Known in Spain as Slugs, Muerte Viscos, this movie is based upon the novel Slugs by Shaun Hutson. You may think, do I really want to watch a movie about slugs? And then you see who directed it: Juan Piquer Simón, the director of Pieces, one of the most insane pieces of cinema ever filmed.

Trust me, you want to see this. You want to see it right now.

When a rural town discovers that black slugs spawned from the disposal of toxic waste have infiltrated their water supply, all bets are off. Only a health inspector named Mike Brady has a chance to save any of them, but the authorities ridicule him at every turn.

You’re not watching this for the story. You’re watching it for the moments when slugs come ripping their way out of human bodies, like the guy who has them come out of his nose while he’s toasting a client or the unfortunate couple whose post-coitus comes with a nasty case of murderous mollusks.

Slugs don’t have teeth and certainly don’t kill people like they do in this film. Screw that — these slugs are awesome. This is the kind of movie that I will force you to watch when you visit, yet I’ll be jealous that this isn’t my first time watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Also known as Death Kisses and Shudder, this gender and species swapped cover version of Willard is all about Susan Bradley, a little girl who can control spiders, which she does to kill her mother — well, she was gonna kill daddy — before taking out anyone else who displeases her. Susan really loves her spiders — to the point that one scene almost suggests that she loves them biblically. Oh 1975, what a magical time you were to be alive.

The big issue is Walter, Susan’s creepy uncle and a dirty cop. He has evidence that his niece has killed at least two people, but he covers it up and even kills to protect her, all so he can get the chance to aardvark with this little arachnophile. Guess what? She’s not having it. Oh yeah — Walter was also sleeping with her mom and helping her plan to murder his own brother. Whew!

You kind of have to love a movie where a little girl kills an entire VW worth of teenagers at the drive-in. This movie checks almost all the boxes for our site: murderous children and animals gone wild. If only there was an acid sequence, a Satanic ritual and George Eastman dressed as a big hairy tarantula.

Writer and producer Daniel Cady would go on from this to write and produce several adult films, such as Soft Places, Reflections and Tomboy under the name William Dancer. He also produced the regional shocker Dream No Evil.

Director Chris Munger would also direct Black Starlet and The Year of the Communes, a documentary narrated by Rod Steiger.

You can watch the Rifftrax version of this movie on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Also known as Konchu Daisenso (which translates to Insect War), this Japanese apocalyptic film was directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, who often found himself as an assistant director to Akira Kurosawa (on 1952’s The Idiot), Keisuke Kinoshita (Carmen Come Home) and Masaki Kobayashi (1956’s The Thick-Walled Room). He would use the name Norman Cooper here.

It’s written by Susumu Takaku, who would later write 92 episodes of the anime Mazinger Z, the Fist of the North Star anime movie and numerous Sentai shows.

The Shochiku Company was considered a prestige studio, not one that was part of the kaiju and science fiction crazes of the 50’s and 60’s in Japan. But here we are, with one of the few films that the studio made within these genres.

Somewhere in the Anan Archipelago, Akiyama Joji is making time with Annabelle, who is not his full-time woman, when an American jet carrying a nuke goes horribly off-course above. Charly, one of the crew, has a flashback to World War II thanks to an insect. He begs for drugs as a release from his pain, begging not to go back into the war. This is 1968, not today when PTSD is common knowledge. Suddenly, the plane flies into a swarm of insects and explodes, with several parachutes escaping the wreckage.

Charly is played by Arthur “Chico” Lourant, who made his way to Japan via the Korean War before staying there as an actor, with roles in Gamera vs. Jiger and Prophecies of Nostradamus, which was released in the U.S. as The Last Days of Planet Earth.

The hydrogen bomb on board is missing and now Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon must find it. At the same time, Joji’s wife Akiyama must deal with her adulterous husband and the unwanted attentions of her boss Kudo. And hey — there’s Charly, who seems to be the only survivor. The rest? Dead in a cave and covered with insect bites.

Joji has found a watch whole looking for insects for Dr. Nagumo. This is the only fact that the military needs to put the blame for the two deaths on him, as the watch is government issue. Yukari begs the doctor to speak for her husband, just as we learn that insects are destroying India.

Meanwhile, Dr. Nagumo meets the only other witness to the accident, Joji’s lover Annabelle, who knows way more about the insects on the island than maybe even this scientist. That’s because she’s at once a scarlet woman, a lover of nature, an enemy to capitalism and, yes, a mad scientist.

This is a film with no real heroes and constant inhumanity to man, so you take the good where you can get it, you know?

“I don’t care whether I live in a free society of a Communist one. I just want to breed vast numbers of insects that drive people mad and scatter them all over the world.” Oh Annabelle!

Kathy Horan, who plays this role, shows up as a stock American in plenty of Japanese films of this era, including The Green Slime and the astoundingly great King Kong Escapes.

Meanwhile, Charly dies and it’s revealed that the insects have laid their eggs inside him. As he expires, they all chant “Genocide! Genocide!” This movie has become pure drug-filled post-nuke madness. What follows is even more buggy, as they say: the good doctor allows himself to be injected with insect venom so he can connect with their hive mind and learn their plan for dominating the world. Seriously, do not dose yourself before this scene.

Nobody really gets out of this alive and if you think Japanese directors are going to allow the Americans to not look like amoral scientists who will quickly nuke their small island from orbit, perhaps you don’t understand that, well, we already did that twice to them.

Seriously, this is one demented film.:

You can watch the Cinematic Titanic version of this movie on Tubi. The Criterion Collection released this film on a compilation set titled When Horror Came to Shochiku along with Goku Bodysnatcher from Hell, The Living Skeleton (which it played double features with in the U.S.) and The X From Outerspace. You can buy it on their site.

Alexandre Aja may be known for High Tension and his remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, Maniac and Piranha, but this man against nature movie may be my favorite film he’s done.

Produced by Sam Raimi, the film has a heart at the center of its story — what it’s like to grow up and perhaps move beyond the experience of your parents. Oh yeah — it also has a category five hurricane and numerous gigantic alligators that want to snack on human flesh.

University of Florida swimmer Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario, the Maze Runner films) gets a call from her sister Beth, telling her to get out of the state of Florida before Hurricane Wendy descends. Haley is more worried about her father (Barry Pepper, The Green Mile), who isn’t answering his phone.

She goes through a police blockade to check on him, finding his dog Sugar but not him. Heading back their abandoned family home, she finds her father knocked out and his escape cut off by several gigantic alligators.

The rest of the film is pretty much a thrill ride — can Haley and her father escape the alligators and make it out of the storm? Will the dog survive? Can they swim fast enough?

I really wish that I had seen this in a theater instead of alone on my couch. This movie demands a sold out show of people screaming all around you at every single jump scare. It’s effective on your own, but it had to have been awesome with an audience.

Remember Donald G. Jackson?

From the man who shat out Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, The Roller Blade Seven, The Legend of the Rollerblade Seven and Return of the Roller Blade Seven — and well, Hell Comes to Frogtown is pretty good — comes the affront to humanity known as Rollergator.

P.J. Smith is a teenage girl tries who is trying to help a small, purple-colored, jive-talking alligator as he attempts to escape from the clutches of a greedy carnival owner played by Joe Estevez. Along the way, they meet a swamp farmer played by Ed Wood alum Conrad Brooks (he somehow survived being in Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Sinister Urge, Bride of the Monster and The Beast from Yucca Flats and yes, I realize that Coleman Francis directed that last one).

This movie has it all. Carnivals. Dark ninjas. Frogface. Roller blade mama. Pure pain. Forced humor. Roller skating gators. Sports bras. And it’s all for kids.

Erin O’Bryan, who plays Roller Blade Mama and would also play Madame Zora in Baby Ghost, a movie with nearly the same cast and crew, appeared in plenty of Playboy lingerie VHS tapes. No one else really ever appeared anywhere else in this movie, despite the promise — or threat — or Rollergator 2 in the end credits.

You can watch the Rifftrax version of this film on Tubi.

Inspired by today’s obsession with reality TV and social media stars, writer-director Steven Jay Bernheim’s clever mockumentary fixes on a Paris Hilton-esque heiress named London (Julia Faye West) who is struggling to regain her past fame in the wake of three sisters called The Kims — think Kardashians.

London has it all — product endorsements, talent managers, pet psychics, private jets, fashion shows, yachts, celebrity friends, the smallest chihuahua ever — and she eventually regains her fame. But are we the ones paying for it?

This movie has plenty of people in it that know all about being a celebrity. Denise Richards is top featured and you’ll remember her from being a Bond girl, as well as appearing in Starship Troopers, Wild Things, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Valentine. Then there’s Mike Tyson, who is one of the most recognizable people born in the modern era, playing himself.

Charles Fleisher — yep, the voice of Roger Rabbit — plays a talk show host and John Witherspoon — in his last role — plays Joe the Plumber.

Steven Jay Bernheim has produced plenty of projects — the Ice-T movie Gangland for one — but this is his first directorial effort. My favorite IMDB credit is that he played himself on The Dr. Phil Show in an episode all about gold-digging secrets.

Loren Lester (the voice of Nightwing in the Batman cartoons, as well as Fritz Hansel in Rock ‘n Roll High School) also is in this. I love looking up people to see what roles they’ve played and then realizing just how many things I’ve seen or heard them in.

You can visit the official site and Facebook page for more information. Reality Queen! will be available on demand and on DVD, as well as in select theaters across America starting January 10.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR company.

A tight-knit group of teens finds themselves fighting for their lives when unexpected visitors — a flock of flesh-eating birds (err, pterodactyls?) infected by a malicious virus — invade their campsite. One by one, these avian assassins wipe them out. Originally shown as Flu Bird Horror on SyFy way back in August 23, 2008 (when it was still Sci-Fi), this movie has just been re-released on DVD.

Somehow, I’ve watched eight films associated with Leigh Scott over the last few hours. I blame these Mill Creek sets!

In this one, seven camping delinquents — with the goal of reintegration to society — are attacked by mutated birds, killing their counselor and wounding one of them. One of them, Johnson, takes over the group through intimidation. While all that’s happening, Ranger Garrett tries to save everyone. He’s played by Lance Guest (Halloween II, The Last Starfighter), who is always a welcome sight. Sarah Butler, who was in the remake of I Spit On Your Grave, also appears.

The original idea was that infected people would transform into the giant bird-like monsters. However, the budget wasn’t there for that idea to make it into the movie.

Mill Creek Entertainment’s Savage Nature set has this movie and three other films all about the evil side of Mother Nature. You also get a code for all four films on their MovieSPREE service. Want to see it for yourself? Then grab a copy right here.

You can also watch this on Amazon Prime.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by Mill Creek Entertainment.

Fred Brown comes home from the Vietnam war, finds his wife in bed with a new lover, and goes wild, killing her and both of his parents. As he cleans off his knife, a falcon tears out his left eye and blinds him in the other before he says goodbye to the son he’s spared. Also: it’s the same house from The Beyond!

That’s just the beginning of this film, a movie that I can’t even begin to piece together. Most importantly, I question why Robert Vaughn would have signed on for it. Did he need money this badly?

But don’t get me wrong. This is a 1980’s Filmirage movie with controversy at the heart of who created it. That means that no matter what, I’m going to love it.

There are three different people who could have directed this movie.

Aristide Massaccesi, who you probably would know best as Joe D’Amoto. Most of the crew members believe that he was the director. In an interview in the book Spaghetti Nightmares, he said, “It seemed to me that the most sensible thing was to give the job of directing the dialogues to Michele Soavi’s assistant, Claudio Lattanzi, while I took care of the special effects scenes. In the end, I let Lattanzi sign as the director.” He was also the cinematographer of this movie under his alias Fred Sloniscko, Jr.

Claudio Lattanzi, who assisted Soavi on his documentary film Dario Argento’s World of Horror and was an assistant on his film Stage Fright. D’Amoto, who also produced the latter, offered Lattanzi a chance to direct Killing Birds when Soavi turned down the film as he was about to make The Church with Argento.

The controversy doesn’t stop there, as even who wrote this movie is under suspicion.

Over Christmas of 1986, Claudio Lattanzi wrote a story called Il Cancello Obsoleto about a record producer who invites a rock band to a deserted house to record a tune, without knowing that Nazi soldiers are buried there. This sounds like a combination of Sodoma’s Ghost — which wouldn’t come out until 1988 — and 1989’s Paganini Horror.

D’Amoto asked him to replace the rock band and the Nazis with killer birds, wanting to call the movie Talons. However, Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi claim that the movie was based on their script Artigli, which means…Talons.

The truth is probably that D’Amoto didn’t want his name in too many places, so he just did what he always did — just about everything and either gave people credit or used one of his many names to cover the rest.

Anyways…

Twenty years later, a small group of college seniors, Steve Porter, Mary (Leslie Cumming, Witchery), Paul, Anne (Tara Wendel, who is also in Ghosthouse and Tenebre), Rob, Jennifer (Lin Gathright, who is also in D’Amoto’s Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, Part 2) and a local cop, Brian, are looking for the green billed woodpecker, a rare species which went extinct four years after this movie.

Fred Brown, that man who went wild on his family, gives them plenty of info and they use his old home as a base, but find nthing but a rotting corpse. But then all sorts of even stranger things — odder than a corpse in a truck — happen.

That’s when the kids start dying left and right, like a zombie beating Jennifer to death, Brian being burnt to death, Mary getting killed by a zombie, Rob getting choked by getting his necklace caught in a generator and another zombie getting Paul.

It turns out that Steve is Brown’s son from all those years ago and the dad tells them that the zombies only killed those who were afraid of them. Well, yeah. They’re zombies. Finally, he tells them to leave and we hear him scream. That’s the end!

Charitably, this film is a mess yet I loved nearly every single frame of it. It’s pointless and confusing and even its titles don’t line up, because it’s called Killing Birds–Zombi 5 in Italy and Zombie Flesheaters 4 in the UK.

God bless you, Joe D’Amoto.

Jaws is so often referred to as the exact moment that the New Hollywood went from artists to moneymakers. It did more than that; it decreased the number of people that visited beaches in the year after its wake and conservation groups often name the movie as one of the main reasons why sharks are on the endangered list. Author Peter Benchley has even been quoted as saying that he wouldn’t have written the novel had he known what sharks were really like.

It took Steven Spielberg from a director who had only done The Sugarland Express and TV movies like Duel into a proven creator of mainstream pleasing films. And the three notes in the theme has become a mnemonic for a foreboding sense of doom.

The film’s three stars — Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss — aren’t truly stars. They’re everymen who could be destroyed by the shark at any moment. There’s no way of knowing who, if any, of them will survive (and what will be left of them). 

This wouldn’t have been possible if Brody had been played by Charlton Heston or Robert Duvall. Quint was almost played by Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden. And Hooper could have been Jon Voight, Timothy Bottoms, Joel Grey or Jeff Bridges. All of these choices would lead to a completely different movie and less of a chance to capture lightning in a bottle. 

Yet for all the chum that has been slung at this movie for initiating the wave of the blockbuster, it’s curiously against the mainstream. The politicians of Amity only care for one thing — making money — despite the obvious threat against life. And there are three poles of man at the end of the 20th century — Hooper, the educated man who depends on technology; Quint, the filth spewing warrior who is unashamed and unafraid; and Brody, a man who exists between two of them, who must overcome his fear of the water to save his children — everyone’s children, really — from nature’s most perfect predator. Quint must perish — he’s the last of a dying breed — as a sacrifice so that the new ways can be inspired by the past and remember them. 

My own experience with Jaws was limited as a child; I was three when it came out. I do remember my father discussing the sequel at length with a cousin — it’s one of the first endings I ever had spoiled for me — and I vividly recall the Ideal game where each player had a small hook and had to pull parts out of the belly of the Great White beast before it snapped against your little tiny child fingers.

Jaws changed how we experience movies. It changed how movies were released — instead of a slow rollout, it hit 465 screens all at once in the summer, a time when studios mostly got rid of movies they saw as schlock. And it changed how they were marketed, with $1.8 million spent promoting it, including $700,000 on national TV spots. The big spending — including doubling the film’s filming budget — led to a $470 worldwide gross, numerous sequels, ripoffs and years later, this page you’re reading right now.

For a movie that started without a finished script, no set actors and no shark — to paraphrase a Dreyfuss quote — things ended up working out just fine.

This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum Special Issue #4, which you can buy here.