In #NoJoke, singer Andrew Cole sets out to convince his musical idols to help him make a song for victims of bullying. He’s joined by Jeff Goldblum, Slash, Patrick Stewart, Lemmy, Chad Smith, Jane Lynch and more, who share their talents and their sometimes painful experiences with him.

From writer/director Manfred Becker, #NoJoke chronicles Andrew’s journey to create a song with some of the biggest stars in the industry. Along the way, he faces up to his painful past, while giving viewers a deep personal insight into the issue of bullying.

There are plenty more famous people who share their feelings about bullying, including Randy Bachman, Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf, Charlie Sheen, Michael Biehn, Diego Boneta, Julian Lennon and Steve Vai.

You have to hand it to Becker for editing together all of this footage to make a coherent film. I’m not certain why it had certain things in it, like Jim Carrey posing for a picture with Andrew. It could have been a lot more focused without fawning over celebrities. Seriously, I feel like a bully for finding any fault with this.

#NoJoke is available on demand from Indiecan Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company.

Oh man, where do I even begin in trying to make sense of this movie?

It’s not a sequel to Demons, no matter what the title tells you.

It was called Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat in America, when it most assuredly has nothing to do with that film.

And somehow, it was nearly called De Profundis (From The Deep) and is also sometimes referred to as Demons 6: Armageddon, which makes sense because it’s filled with scenes of space and planets randomly throughout the movie.

It’s also — sit down for this one — an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno, made back when Argento hadn’t yet decided to close off that cycle of movies with Mother of Tears. Yes, the script to this movie was adapted from Daria Nicolodi’s (Argento’s ex-wife and creator of The Three Mothers trilogy) script for what was going to be an official Argento Three Mothers film that never saw the light of day. And who better than Luigi Cozzi — who in addition to making Starcrash and the Ferrigno Hercules films, runs Argento’s store Profondo Rosso store — to direct this?

Are you confused yet? I am and I haven’t even started watching the movie yet!

Here — watch the whole thing yourself and see if you can make any sense of it.

This one is all about Marc (Urbano Barberini, who was actually in Demons), a horror film director, is making a movie called Suspiria De Profundis that is a sequel to Suspiria and based on Thomas De Quincey’s story Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow. There’s even a sequence where the characters discuss just how good of a director Argento is as they reveal what the Mother of Madness looks like, dripping with worms and gore.

Marc casts his actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin, Too Beautiful to Die) in the lead, along with Nora (Caroline Munro, who I should not have to tell you anything about other than the fact that her being in this movie makes me overjoyed). Things seem to go pretty well for all involved until Levana, who it turns out is a real person, objects to how she’s portrayed in the movie and goes wild, blowing up food in refrigerators and people’s chests.

Levana — the Mother of Tears — may be the lead villain, but there’s also an evil film producer in a wheelchair named Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey, Demonia, The Devil’s Honey) who hints at wanting to take Marc’s soul. And Nora has designs on Marc, so there’s that. Also — a refrigerator that sprays food everywhere and Michele Soavi in a cameo as a director.

This movie is also packed with mid-80’s hair metal, featuring Bang Tango and White Lion all over the soundtrack.

Charitably, this movie is a mess, but I completely loved every single minute of it. There’s enough bile and blood and breasts and beasts to satisfy just about any horror movie lover. I’m in for Demons 7 if these guys want to make it.

If you want the details on all the different versions of Demons, we have you covered right here.

UPDATE: I’m excited to report that Severin is releasing this on blu ray! Order it now!

Oh Lamberto Bava…here we go again.

A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michel Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from any movies in the Demons series. Soon, they find a metal mask — whoops, this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around, it causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they discover an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides that this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments of her revenge.

Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not also remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it?

That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, often reading it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he chose Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.

Sadly, Lamberto is no Mario. He tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sunday is the kind of film that’s going to live forever.

Davide is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancee Klaus Kinski here) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?

There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. Well, you get what you want, trust me. Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman as the demonic form of Anibas.

Man, what a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old tears and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws while she spits white fluid all over him. Oh yeah — she also has the facial scars that Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s vastly superior film.

I don’t want to make Lamberto feel bad. He has some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Mask and did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sect and Cemetery Man.

It even has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.

Hitcher In the Dark. Nightmare Beach.The Man from Deep River. Eaten Alive! Cannibal Ferox. Ghosthouse. Iron Master. And throw in even more — Eyeball, Spasmo, Orgasmo, So Sweet…So Perverse and A Quiet Place to Kill. Man, I love Umberto Lenzi and his films. I didn’t even mention his crime films!

Originally known as Black Demons, this was Lenzi’s last horror movie. In interviews, he’d claim it as one of his favorite films, but felt it was ruined by the lack of budget and acting.

Three American college students, Dick (Joe Balogh, Hitcher In the Dark), his sister Jessica and her South African boyfriend Kevin (Keith Van Hoven, The House of Clocks) are on vacation in Brazil when Dick attends a voodoo ceremony and suddenly gains frightening new powers.

Those powers manifest themselves when they end up in a plantation outside of Rio and Dick mistakingly raises six slaves from the dead as zombies, who start killing everyone in sight, including doing some Fulci-esque eyeball damage.

Lenzi intended Demoni 3 to be called Black Demons, and he did not like it when the film was later retitled to make it seem like it was part of Lamberto Bava’s Demons series. To make matters even more confusing, Bava directed a 1988 made-for-TV movie called The Ogre that was released in the U.S. as Demons III: The Ogre. And to top all of that off, Michele Soavi’s film The Church was originally going to be Demons 3.

Sound confusing? Let Joe Bob Briggs clear it up for you.

Classic film star and queer icon Montgomery Clift’s legacy has long been a story of tragedy and self-destruction — the slowest suicide in show business and a “tragic beauty” or “beautiful loser.” He was a gorgeous man whose twenty-some movies place him in the same rarified air of sex symbols like James Dean and Marlon Brando, actors who played a new type of man for Hollywood. One that was sensitive and also troubled. But a car crash and a need to hide his homosexuality has always pointed to Clift as a figure of great sadness. But when his nephew dives into the family archives, a much more complicated picture emerges.

Director Robert Anderson Clift is the son of Brooks Clift, Monty’s brother. He may have never met his famous uncle, but he was able to learn more about him by meeting the people who actually knew him.

This film attempts to portray a different side to the actor than the books Montgomery Clift: A Biography by Patricia Bosworth and Monty: A Biography of Montgomery Clift by Robert Laguardia. However, the movie does neglect that Clift had a twin sister and her entire side of the family refused to be part of this film. Most of the documentary comes from recordings that Brooks had made of extensive conversations with his family.

The director told The Guardian, “For us, it seemed there was this big difference between what people thought about Monty in the public sphere and what people that knew him would say,” said Clift. “I wanted to figure out why there was such a difference.”

I’d recommend checking out this film, which posits that the books written on Clift came from a place more homophobic than even the Hollywood system that Clift existed within.

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

Rian Johnson has jumped genres throughout his career — the noir Brick, the comedy of The Brothers Bloom, the science fiction of Looper, the big blockbuster that was Star Wars: the Last Jedi and now Knives Out. He also helmed an episode of Breaking Bad that won him a directing Emmy.

Since 2005, Johnson has had this Agatha Christie-influenced film in mind. He also cited films like Deathtrap and Clue as cultural touchstones for this movie.

So what’s it all about? Well, crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead — a suicide — at his estate the day after his 85th birthday. Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been hired by an unnamed party to investigate the crime. From Harlan’s dysfunctional family to his devoted staff, Blanc sifts through a web of red herrings and self-serving lies to uncover the truth behind Harlan’s untimely death.

First things first: my attention span has been ruined by a steady diet of grindhouse movies, Hong Kong cinema and the works of Italian gorehounds. A movie over two hours long is quite intimidating to me, but I did my best to stick with it.

So the good things: Daniel Craig is absolutely having the time of his life playing private detective Benoit Blanc and every scene with him is a joy to watch. I really enjoyed the twists and turns of the plot, as well as the detection flashbacks, which brought to mind the original Murder on the Orient Express. And it’s always great to see Plummer in a movie, as he was, after all the emperor of the galaxy in Starcrash. Yes, that’s my cultural callback for this venerated actor.

This movie is a chance for Chris Evans to break out of the superhero mold he’s found himself in. And Ana de Armas — who is also in the Eli Roth film Knock Knock — is great as Marta Cabrera, the nurse who finds herself inheriting the estate of the murdered writer who is the patriarch of this family of liars and thieves at the heart of this story.

Hey — there’s M. Emmet Walsh, filling in for Ricky Jay who died during production. And Riki Lindhome from Garfunkle and Oates and the remake of The Last House on the Left (and also Under the Silver Lake). Plus, it’s cool to see Frank Oz in his first onscreen role since, well, Blues Brothers 2000.

But man — there are so many characters here that have little or no time to shine. Jamie Lee Curtis is basically playing a cameo role and you could say the same thing for Toni Colette, Michael Shannon and Don Johnson.

When we reached the one hour point, my wife asked me, “How much longer does this have?” I told her that we weren’t even halfway done yet and she replied, “What else do they have to tell us?”

I liked the film more than her. Despite reading reviews filled with hyperbole saying things about how this movie has reinvented the murder mystery and turned it on its head, I thought it was a pleasant enough diversion. It’s not going to replace Agatha Christie movies for me, but for an audience that has probably never seen the films like Sleuth and Gosford Park that Johnson is inspired by, it’s certainly a revelation for them.

Your mileage, as I always say, may vary.

Let’s just assume that the events of Demons actually happened, as this movie does. Released just seven months after the original, this movie opens with the residents of a high-rise apartment building watching a movie dramatization of the events that took place in that film. They watch as several teenagers trespass into the closed-off city that was destroyed after the demonic outbreak. Finding the dead body of a demon, one of the teens accidentally drips blood in its mouth and the whole thing starts all over again.

Sally Day (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Mother of Tears, Opera) is upset that her boyfriend hasn’t come to her sweet sixteen party — or as they say in Italy, dolce sedici anni — and she decides to watch the movie. So, you know, as these things happen, a demon crawls out of her television set and infects her. She kills nearly everyone at her party and turns them into more demons, who begin to infect the entire apartment building. Little kids, dogs, cops, bodybuilders, pregnant women — no one is safe from these demons.

George and Hannah (David Edwin Knight and Nancy Brilli, who was also in Body Count) spend most of the movie trying to escape Sally so that they can have their child. She’s nearly unstoppable, plus she has a flying demon on her side.

Italian movie fans should keep their eyes open for Asia Argento, who debuted in this film as Ingrid. Plus, Bobby Rhodes (from the original, as well as Hercules and War Bus Commando), Virginia Bryant (who is also in the unrelated sequel Demons 3: The Ogre), Lino Salemme (Ripper from the first film), Davide Marotta (who played a child alien in a very famous series of Italian Kodak commercials and was also the monstrous boy in Phenomena) and Michele Mirabella (Dancing Crow from Thunder).

Originally, Hannah’s baby would become a demon inside her and claw its way out of her stomach. This scene was taken out when Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento decided they wanted a happier ending. Which is nice, I guess.

After all, this movie is more about jump scares and less about freaking you out with the sheer amount of gore that it features. Is it any wonder that it has less of a metal soundtrack and instead features new wave bands like The Smiths, The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim, Dead Can Dance, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel and The Producers?

You can watch this on Shudder.

Here’s a drink for this film.

Hellacious High Rise

• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. sweet and sour mix
• .25 oz. Cointreau
• .25 oz. grenadine
• 2 oz. orange juice

1. Pour everything into a glass with crushed ice. Don’t forget Sally’s birthday party.