If there’s a redneck movie hall of fame, let me nominate Charles B. Pierce. If all he did was create The Town That Dreaded Sundown and The Legend of Boggy Creek, he’d make it. But he was also quite possibly the writer of Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day.” He also directed The Norseman, a movie that improbably placed Lee Majors into Viking gear. It’s as amazing as it sounds.

Here, he tackles a really familiar redneck movie trope: bootlegging. Did you think it’d be about something different from the title?

The movie starts in 1921, where 10-year-old Othar Pruitt watches as his dad is murdered by a rival family. Twelve years later, Othar (Paul Koslo, who was as redneck as an actor from Germany can get) and Dewey Crenshaw (Dennis Fimple, a redneck actor if there ever was one) are running hooch across statelines.

When Other’s Grandpa Pruitt (Slim Pickens) is murdered by the Woodall clan, Othar and Dewey go to war. Along the way, Jaclyn Smith shows up in one of her first roles.

Unlike Pierce’s other — and perhaps better — films, this one isn’t celebrated and won’t be getting a 4K reissue. But you can watch it on Amazon Prime. Drink up while you do.

In 1967, Martin Scorsese made his first movie, the black and white film I Call First, which was later retitled to Who’s That Knocking at My Door. Originally intended as the first of the director’s semiautobiographical J. R. Trilogy — along with Mean Streets — it was followed by this movie, an adaption of American anarchist Ben L. Reitman’s semi-autobiographical Sister of the Road. Made for Roger Corman, it taught Scorsese that movies could be made cheaply yet still entertain audiences while reinforcing his friend and mentor John Cassavetes’ belief that the auteur should make the movies that he wanted to make, instead of someone else’s projects.

Actually, Cassavetes was pretty blunt. After Scorsese showed him the finished product, the actor embraced him and said, “Marty, you’ve just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit. It’s a good picture, but you’re better than the people who make this kind of movie. Don’t get hooked into the exploitation market, just try and do something different.”

Boxcar Bertha Thompson (Barbara Hershey) and “Big” Bill Shelly (David Carradine) are train robbers and lovers embroiled in the plight of railroad workers as they try to unionize. Bertha is implicated in a murder and the two become fugitives.

Bernie Casey shows up as Von Morton and Carradine’s father John is also in this as H. Buckram Sartoris. Seeing as how it was a Corman picture, it wasn’t always intended to be an art project, as the producer wanted another Bloody Mama.

Hershey said that the movie was “a lot of fun even though it’s terribly crippled by Roger Corman and the violence and sex. But between the actors and Marty Scorsese the director, we had a lot of fun. We really had characters down but one tends to not see all that, because you end up seeing all the blood and sex.”

There was a rumor that Roger Corman’s wife Julie Corman had actually obtained the rights to the story from Bertha Thompson herself. The story goes that Corman had tracked her down to a hotel in San Francisco, but the woman wouldn’t let her in. It’s also a great lesson in carnie PR work, as the author explained that there wasn’t ever a real Bertha. In fact, she was a combination of at least three women he knew.

I have to wonder how the Cormans reacted when they finally saw this and all of the violence that was usually so exciting in the early 70’s new Hollywood pictures felt so doomed here.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

A woman boards a train for a murder mystery game that her lover acts in. However, partway through their journey, several of the actors in the fake murder take things further than expected, making the mystery an actual series of thefts and murders. And this movie is just getting started with this twist!

The next one happens when the train derails into a lake in the middle of the night. Now, beyond being trapped in the sinking wreckage, there’s also an amphibian monster that wants to devour every single one of them. Think Humanoids from the Deep.

Seriously, I walked away from the screen for one minute and suddenly I was watching a completely different one than I started. I had to rewind to make sure I hadn’t somehow started watching a completely different movie. And I kept wondering when does Lance Henriksen show up? The end. He shows up at the end.

Also, I kinda love that the monster is known as the Soul Shredder.

This film was written and produced by Suzanne DeLaurentiis, who was also the producer for Rocky V and Mannequin 2: Mannequin On the Move. I also learned that she’s the cousin of Frankie Avalon from her site. There’s always a music connection!

If you’re in the mood for a movie that’ll keep you guessing — and combines undersea humanoid monsters with 1930’s Clue–like murder mystery — this is it. Honestly, it’s a genre unto itself.

D-Railed is available today, August 6, via on demand and DVD.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR department. That has no impact on our review.

There’s nothing I hate more than seeing the Troma logo displayed before a movie they only have the rights to. It’s often enough to make me shut a film off, which I did with this one before heading back one more time to try and make it through.

Preacherman was shot entirely on location in Monroe, North Carolina and was produced by a Charlotte, NC production company, Preacherman Corp. Eleven of the seventeen actors in this movie were locals from the Carolinas and most of the crew was from there, too. Outside of star, writer, producer and director Amos Juxley (actually Brooklyn-born Albery T. Viola) and Iilene Kristen, who played Mary Lou and would go on to be on Ryan’s Hope and One Life to Live, not many of them ever acted again.

The Preacherman Amos Huxley loves to get money and make love to young ladies, which runs him afoul of the law in White Oak County. Soon, Amos has escaped yet another series of cops and begins living with the Crabtree family, who are farmers and therefore must have a farmer’s daughter, Mary Lou. He somehow convinces everyone that he’s going to return her virtue and also gets her to believe that the angel Leroy is coming to make her clean again.

The cops are in on the Crabtree’s main crop, which is moonshine, but the Preacherman convinces them to start a new church funded by that demon alcohol. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Bill Simpson, who played Sheriff Zero Bull also played Zero in Moonshine Mountain. He also reprised that role in the sequel. Yes, somehow there was a second movie in this series, entitled Preacherman Meets Widderwoman, which never received a national distribution and only played regionally in the South. Screenwriters Joseph Alvarez and W. Henry Smith also penned the hicksploitation-centric romps Trucker’s Woman and Redneck Miller.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Peter Sullivan is a writer and producer whose IMDB page is replete with TV movies with words like Christmas, The Wrong and Cheerleader in the titles. If this was 1970, he’d be making movies that’d run late at night on CBS and play at drive-ins. Today, his movies end up on Netflix.

Brenda Song plays Jennifer Williams, a woman who has just recovered from a brutal car accident, yet she can’t remember her husband Russell (Mike Vogel, who was in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). You’ll guess the twist from frame one of the film, as this is no giallo or even Lifetime movie. It’s not even that good, sadly.

The one good part of the whole film is the scene where Detective Frank Page wraps a teddy bear for his daughter, only for the reveal that his daughter disappeared years ago and he has an entire room of wrapped teddy bears as he weeps gigantic tears. That makes up for the fact that every time Dennis Haysbert, who plays the role, speaks, all I can think of are his insurance commercials.

There are junk movies. And then there are movies that are painfully boring, not even good enough to be cinematic NyQuil. This would be one of those movies, a film so bad that I’m shocked that it wasn’t littering the bottom of the new release racks of sub-Asylum films at Walmart.

You can watch this on Netflix.

Jesus Christ is born again on Earth. Maybe. Then again, he could also be a biker tripping on acid with a hardcore Southern Baptist preacher daddy. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his gang of bikers and he’s taking them on an LSD-fueled pilgrimage to the Promised Land. Oh 1972 — what a magical time you were for completely off the rails movies.

The title doesn’t show up for fifteen minutes and the same guy that wrote and directed this — William F. McGaha — also stars in it. He did the same thing for two other movies, Bad Girls for the Boys and The Speed Lovers.

Somehow, he was able to convince Joana Moore (Touch of Evil), Slim Pickens (the guy rode a nuke into Russia for us, folks) and Burr DeBenning (five years before he’d chase a melting Steve West all over the city).

With a tagline like “J.C. And His Disciples Were A Gang Of Broads, Bikes And Blacks,” how can you really go wrong? Well, the actual film doesn’t live up to the premise, of a biker Jesus changing the world, but on this budget, they were lucky he changed his vestments.

The poster and taglines though? That’s what movies are all about.

This is the first Child’s Play movie made without the involvement of creator Don Mancini and actor Brad Dourif. Instead, Lars Klevberg (whose film Polaroid has been lost in the legislative downfall of the Weinsteins) directed from a script by Tyler Burton Smith (who wrote the video games Sleeping Dogs and Quantum Break).

Mancini has criticized the remake while understanding that rights holder Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer can do anything they want. When asked if he and fellow producer David Kirschner would be involved, he said, “We said no thank you, because we have our ongoing thriving business with Chucky. Obviously my feelings were hurt… And I did create the character and nurture the franchise for three decades. So when someone says, “Oh yeah, we would love to have your name on the film,” it was hard not to feel like I was being patronized. They just wanted our approval. Which I strenuously denied them.”

Instead of the supernatural origins of the past, this Chucky is a Buddi doll created by the Kaslan Corporation. This kind of tears out the most frightening part of the Chucky concept — a doll that somehow comes to life yet is consumed by pure evil.

The real problem starts in a foreign Buddi assembly factory, where an employee takes out all of the safety protocols before killing himself. That doll eventually makes its way to the home of Karen Barclay (Aubrey Plaza) and her hearing-impaired son Andy (Gabriel Bateman, who was also in Annabelle and Lights Out).

While Andy eventually gains real human friends, Chucky places his friend’s happiness above all common sense and restraint. Unlike the past, where Chucky is motivated only by his own concerns, here you can see how his lack of human understanding leads to all of the murder and mayhem. He doesn’t realize how a movie that the kids watch, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, can provide laughter and pleasure while real death leads to life-changing results.

This Chucky also has the ability to command phones, household objects, drones and cars, as well as command an army of the next line of Buddi dolls on the night they are introduced, which includes a positively harrowing bear version.

I was totally prepared to absolutely despise this film until I saw it in a new light. I wondered, what if Claudio Fragrasso somehow got his hands on the chance to make Child’s Play? The results wouldn’t be all that great, but they’d sure be fun. That’s what this movie aspires to. It’s certainly entertaining — any movie where the adulterous villain is scalped by a tiller in a watermelon patch while taking down Christmas lights and his face is skinned off and passed around as a gift or a child is sprayed right in the face by a store manager’s blood is going to be a winner in my book. But it could have been a totally different film with a totally different title and lead character without changing the story all that much.

But hey — Mark Hamill is awesome as the voice of Chucky and Tim Matheson shows up as Henry Kaslan, the head of Kaslan Industries. I laughed out loud a few times. And I’m not as married to Chucky as a slasher hero as I am to Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface or anyone else. And let’s face — all of those characters have had some pretty bad movies in their history, too. This one isn’t as bad as any of those. Sure, Chucky looks like unfinished CGI, but you can’t have everything.

There’s also another Chucky movie coming out this year called Charles and Mancini has a TV series in development. Want to learn some more about killer dolls? Check out this list of ten evil dolls that we posted a few weeks ago.