Also known as Gates of Hell Part II: Dead Awakening — while having nothing to do with Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead, which was released in the U.S. with that title — is at least dedicated to the Italian director who is referred to as the Godfather of Gore.

This is the lone directorial effort from G.D. Marcum, who worked on the camera crew for films like the SOV cyberpunk-inspired Interface and the Fred Williamson movies South Beach, Steele’s Law, Thee Days to a Kill and Night Vision.

After some mysterious disappearances in Fort Worth, Texas, Sandra Curtis — the sister of one of the victims — hires Nick Berkley to find her lost sibling. They soon learn that a cult that worships Moloch — so they’re going to Bohemian Grove? — is behind everything and that there’s an amulet that can stop them. Also — a cat gets killed and put inside Sandra’s refrigerator at one point.

Tamara Hext, who played Sandra, also appeared in the TV movie Frequent Flyer and was on Dallas for one episode. She was Miss Texas and the fourth runner up to the 1985 Miss America pageant. Since Texas is pretty much the pageant capital of the world, she had to have been pretty tough. She’s also the mother of Colorado Rockies outfielder Sam Hilliard.

There’s plenty of cool artwork for this movie, but I love that some of the VHS boxes ripped off the artwork from Funeral Home.

You can watch this for free on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Much like the second Beyond the Door — which we’d rather call Shock — this movie has nothing to do with the original Beyond the Door. It comes to us from Jeff Kwitny, who also directed Iced. But what makes this movie sing is that the writing comes from Sheila Goldberg, who wrote the screenplay for Body Count, as well as the dialogue for Stage Fright, Zombi 5: Killing Birds, Ghosthouse and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights Part 2. None of these movies are known for their dialogue or coherence, so that means that I’m going to love every single moment of this film.

What takes it into the stratosphere of mania for me is the producer. Yes, Ovidio G. Assonitis, that magical Egyptian-born Greek man who crafted such wonderous objets d’art such as the original Beyond the Door, Tentacles, Madhouse and Piranha II: The Spawning. He also produced movies like Iron Warrior, Who Saw Her Die?, Forever Emmanuelle and the magical treat that is The Visitor. Somehow and someway, Disney hired him to produce their TV movie Sabrina Goes to Rome. What — Joe D’Amoto was busy?

Shy American college coed Beverly Putnic is on her way to a class trip in Yogoslavia to see an ancient cultural rite (you know, kinda like Midsommar but much more interesting). But she doesn’t realize that she’s due to become a bride of the devil! Blame Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson!) for that!

This movie is also known as Amok Train, which makes much better sense as a title, because after the students escape the village where they’re all nailed shut in their rooms, they board a possessed train that is driven to kill every single one of them. This train is crazy, it can separate itself into single cars, it can jump the tracks and run over people when they hide in a swamp and it can crash into another train and just keep on going.

So where is the train going?

It turns out that Beverly has been selected as Satan’s bride since she was a baby. Luckily, she’s found an 11th-century monk on the train to take her virginity — I bet he does it in the missionary position — which makes her a non-virgin and unfit for the bride of Satan. Um, wouldn’t Satan want a promiscuous woman for a wife?

Anyways, Marius disappears and gives Beverly a book from her mother. She then returns home, looking much older than when she left. There’s a Carrie shock ending where the devil tries to kill her on the plane, but that’s just a dream.

This is the kind of movie that I love, where little to nothing makes sense, where moms drop you off at the airport and are soon beheaded, where everyone dies horrible and trains have personalities and are given to killing college students. It also looks gorgeous with actual thought and art behind each frame, something lost in the glut of direct to streaming films of today.

Who else but Vinegar Syndrome could put this out on blu ray? You should grab this right away.

A grouper is someone who changes sexual gender or orientation later in life. This film also tells us that it also means a bottom-dwelling fish. Two all-American, homophobic high school bullies are seduced by the lovely Meg and then kidnapped, drugged and awaken tied up face to face in an abandoned pool. Absurdity and insanity ensue as we learn that Meg plans on performing a psychological and somewhat sadistic experiment on them to get revenge for the way they’ve treated her brother Orin.

Groupers is packed with outlandish characters, including a one-eyed street thug and a philosophical squatter who all get caught up in this odd tale of revenge while bringing their own, ambiguous motives (and opinions) to the party as they pontificate whether homosexuality is a choice.

Also known as The Devil Master, Master of Evil and Coven, this movie purported to tell you the whole truth — finally — about demons. It seems that demons are kind of like the kids left behind in my small hometown, stuck drinking in bars, doing drugs and balling because there’s nothing else to do but rot.

It comes from the team of Donald Jackson — yes, he of the Roller Blade, Rollergator and Hell Come to Frogtown fame — and Jerry Younkins, who only made this film. It was shot close to my wife’s hometown in Jackson, Michigan.

MIT graduate students Jeff Kreines and his girlfriend Joel DeMott, along with soundman Mark Ranc, shot a video diary while filming this movie, entitled Demon Lover Diary. It details the film falling apart as its being filmed. However, it’s been alleged that the incompetence and infighting shown in this video were all made up to get publicity for the film. But who can say? Any movie that ends with Ted Nugent’s guns being fired directly at the filmmakers is totally worth a watch. Kreines and DeMott would go on to co-direct the documentary Seventeen while Kreines would be a cinematographer on the documentary Depeche Mode: 101.

As for the actual film The Demon Lover, it’s all about a group of teenagers hanging around a cemetery that gets involved with a Satanic priest named Lavall (Younkins) who conjures up a demon from hell that looks like an ape that kills all of them. That’s pretty much the entire movie, right there, minus some scenes of the upper class dabbling with the occult that go absolutely nowhere. Oh yeah — there are also disco, nude sex slave and kung fu scenes just to ensure that this regional wonder got to play on some screen, somewhere.

Also — Younkins severed a finger at work to pony up the $8,000 to make this movie, so that pretty much explains why he got to do pretty much anything he wanted. He’d go on to write Combat and Survival Knives: A User’s Guide and wears a black glove throughout to hide his missing digit.

According to L.A. Weekly, the filmmakers so loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that they “initially consulted director Tobe Hooper for info on film stock, hired Chain Saw cinematographer Daniel Pearl until their money ran out, solicited original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen for a two-day top-billed cameo, and eventually played the Lyric Theater on 42nd Street in New York City, whose marquee can be glimpsed sporting the Chain Saw title in a famous shot from Taxi Driver.”

Damian Kaluta, one of the protagonists of the film, is played by Val Mayerik, who is also one of the creators of Howard the Duck. I’d assume that’s his art on the poster as well. The name of his character Kaluta comes from 1970’s comic book artist Michael W. Kaluta and many of the names in the film are also derived from comic and horror icons of that era, like Detective Tom Frazetta (painter Frank Frazetta, who designed most of Fire and Ice), Officer Lester Gould (Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracy perhaps?), Profesor Peckinpah (director Sam Peckinpah), Elaine Ormsby (Alan Ormsby of Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things), Alex Redondo (Filipino Swamp Thing artist Nestor Redondo), Susan Ackerman (Forest Ackerman, of course), Charles Wrightson (Berni Wrightson, who drew the comic for Creepshow), Jane Corben (Richard Corben, who created Den from the Heavy Metal magazine and movie, as well as the painter of the poster for Spookies), Garrett Adams (Neal Adams), Janis Romero (George Romero) and Pamela Kirby (Jack Kirby).

This movie also features early special effects work by Dennis and Robert Skotak, who would go on to work on movies like Escape from New York, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Mars Attacks!, Galaxy of Terror and so many more.

While this movie is junk — enjoyable junk that I will force people to watch — there’s a lot to be learned from it. Isn’t that what loving movies is all about? Actually, it’s also what the occult is all about too: the secret messages lurking behind the veneer of what seems like nothing.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or just check out the highlights below.

Luigi Cozzi, welcome back to B & S About Movies! We’re so happy to have you back and so pleased that you’ve gifted us with movies like Hercules and Starcrash. I’m so pleased with the magic that you’ve brought us today, a near last gasp of Italian horror at the tail end of the 80’s.

At La Casa di Sol, an ancient Venezian home of various composers, a young violinist (Cozzi’s daughter Giada) practices a Paganini song before she then decides to electrocutes her mother by throwing a hair dryer into the bathtub. We haven’t even started the movie yet and it’s already deranged!

A female rock band is told by their manager that they should find a new song. The drummer travels to a secluded location to meet Mr. Pickett (Donald Pleasence!) to buy an unpublished score by Paganini called “Paganini Horror.” The manager, the drummer and lead singer Kate (Jasmine Maimone, Nancy from Demons) agree to record the song and head to La Casa di Sol to make a music video with horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi, Cemetery Man).

So who owns La Casa? Sylvia (Daria Nicolodi, who beyond writing and appearing in this, wrote Suspiria), who is the young girl from the beginning all grown up.

Oh man, this movie. From the fungus found on the logs used to make Stradivarius violins killing people to invisible walls wiping out most of the audience, this movie is bonkers in the best of ways. There’s also Paganini himself, stabbing people and sealing them up in giant bass cases before setting them on fire, before daylight streams through the window and turns him into ash in the shape of a treble clef.

In the original cut, which was eight minutes longer with scenes of planets, galaxies and parallel dimensions that were supposed to give the movie a stronger science fiction touch, as well as a scene in which Pleasence’s character put on Paganini’s mask and clothes. Cozzi cut these scenes as producer Fabrizio De Angelis wanted a simpler horror movie.

The rules of why people are trapped in the house and whether or not its Hell are never really explained, but this is Italian cinema. There’s going to be plenty of bright red blood, lots of screaming, some 1980’s looking music video scenes and a masked Pleasence stabbing people. It’s a funhouse ride that is well worth taking.

You can get this on blu ray from the awesome people at Severin. I’ve only had a bootleg of this film for years, so I’m happy to finally add it to my collection.

I’ve been excited to watch this movie for some time — it was written by Grady Hendrix, who we interviewed some time back about his book Paperbacks from Hell along with Ted Geoghegan, who wrote and directed We Are Still Here. It’s the first full-length movie from Chelsea Stardust, who was once the assistant to Jason Blum of Blumhouse.

Samantha Craft (Hayley Griffith, who is very endearing) is just trying to make it through her first day as a pizza delivery person so she can continue her singing career. On a trip to the rich Mill Basin section of town, she gets screwed over on a tip — the pizza order itself is strange, with corn as a topping. This brings her into a mansion demanding a tip from the coven that is conducting a ritual, led by Danica Ross (Rebecca Romjin, obviously having a great time acting in this).

The group needs a virgin — Ross’s daughter Judi (Ruby Mondine, Happy Death Day) has already had sex to escape the torment that will surely follow — so they take Sam. As they say, hijinks ensure, as she goes from misadventure to misadventure as she falls in and out of trouble, encountering Danica’s screwup of a husband (Jerry O’Connell, real husband of Romjin), intercoven intrigue between Danica and Gypsy (Arden Myrin, whose face you’ll recognize from numerous great turns in things like Shameless and Insatiable), evil children armed with a strap-on drill, a haxan cloak monster made from a dead husband’s heart, the demon Samaziel, sex with an actual demon and two very fuzzy bunnies.

The film also features appearances by Jordan Ladd (the daughter of actress Cheryl Ladd who appeared in the mid-90’s direct to video Alyssa Milano-starring opus Embrace of the Vampire), Whitney Moore (yes, the Whitney Moore from Birdemic: Shock and Terror), Jeff Daniel Phillips (who gets cast in every Rob Zombie movie), internet personality Hannah Stocking and Skeeta Jenkins (who was memorably Cuddly Bear in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich).

Where a film like The House of the Devil tells a similar story, that movie feels like a 1970’s made for TV movie and as such, feels much more psychological. I’d compare Satanic Panic to a movie like Night of the Demons — a movie made for video rental that hits you with some funny dialogue and isn’t afraid to gross you out, too. It moves quickly and knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, as assured as Sam ends up being by the end of the film. It’s packed with great practical effects and enough gore — and a surprising amount of nudity — to please any genre fan.

There’s also plenty of great easter eggs, like the opening scene openly referencing Halloween and the chant that the coven uses when they hex people coming directly from the Charm of Making from John Boorman’s Excalibur.

Perhaps the funniest thing about this movie is that it’s being sold in Walmart, where they’ve decided to omit the word Satanic from the title, selling it as just plan Panic.

Al Filo del Hacha, or Edge of the Axe, is a very late in the slasher game film directed by José Ramón Larraz, who also directed Estigma, a movie that I’ve been obsessed with for some time. Other films from him include Symptoms, Vampyres and The House That Vanished, which was also released under the titles Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, Psycho Sex Fiend and Psycho Sex. The posters for that movie are great, as they shamelessly steal from The Last House on the Left’s ad campaign.

The crazy thing about this film is that it’s set in the rural Northern California mountain community of Paddock County, yet it’s a mixture of scenes shot in Big Bear Lake, California and Madrid, Spain. Most of the exteriors are in the U.S., while the interiors are a world away. For example, the car wash killing that starts the movie is split, with the signage and cars in America and the actual killing in Spain. It’s a seamless transition, which makes it even more interesting.

Before the credits even roll, nurse Mirna Dobson dies at, well, the edge of the axe at the aforementioned car wash. Just from this first incredibly shot scene, you realize that this is anything more than your basic stalk and slash.

Our hero is Gerald Martin (Barton Falkes, Future-Kill), whose cabin is filled with computers and video games, in direct contrast to the natural world all around him. This puts him at odds with his landlord, a hermit named Brock.

Gerald hangs out with Richard Simmons — no, not the guy who danced with the oldies, but instead a wanna-be lady killer — who works as an exterminator when he’s not acting as a kept husband to his much older wife. He’s played by Page Moseley, who was in Girls Nite Out, Open House and The Jigsaw Murders. And his much older wife? None other than Patty Shepard, who was Hannah Queen of the Vampires and appears in Assignment: Terror, The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman, and Slugs).

Gerald and Richard check out the smell coming out of a bar, which ends up being the corpse of one of the barmaids, who it appears has killed herself. As this is a small town, the police ask them to keep it quiet, kind of like how they ignored someone slaughtering pigs and leaving their heads in the bed, as if these California farmers were Jack Woltz.

Paddock County is a lot like my hometown. All that’s there are bars. Lillian Nebbs is the daughter of the owner of another of those many bars and she’s home from school. She loves technology and video games as much as Gerald, which makes this movie into some sort of science fiction story. Of course, she does wonder why he has a list of all of the dead women on his computer. He replies that he loves making lists of data, you know, as you do.

This is one of my favorite tropes of all movies — a computer that does more than computers in 1988 were actually able to do. This is a pre-Siri world, but the personal computers in this movie are able to speak in a very understandable voice. Trust me — I had a computer in 1988. It was a six-year-old Commodore 64 that took an entire evening to download less than a megabyte of info.

The killings haven’t stopped, as Rita Miller (Alicia Moro, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Slugs) is stalked and killed by someone she seems to recognize before her body is placed on the train tracks and torn asunder. Poor Rita — she has the best slash job I’ve heard of: beautician/prostitute.

This finally puts Officer Frank on the case. He’s just in time, because the farmer’s wife who found the pig’s head is killed and Richard finds the severed head of a nurse while out on the lake cheating with his wife. And oh yeah — yet another woman finds her dog murdered before the killer chops her fingers off and then chops her to bits.

Lillian tells Gerald her family secret — her cousin Charlie has just been released from a mental hospital. And he was there because she pushed him off a swing set and caused the injury. She feels that he’s the one behind the killings. She uses his computer to do research, attempting to learn more about the psychiatrists who treated Charlie.

Later that night, Richard’s wife learns that she’s bankrupt and gets wasted with local drunk Christopher (Jack Taylor, who was in everything from Pieces and Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion to The Ghost Galleon, The Ninth Gate and The Vampires Night Orgy). On their way home, she drunk drives into a tree, only to be further inconvenienced by getting killed by the masked axeman.

At the scene, the cops find a pin from the Lillian’s father’s tavern — the same one she pinned on Gerland at one point — which leads them to question her and her father.

So who is the killer, in this movie that feels just as much American/Spanish backwoods giallo as slasher?

Lillian accuses Gerald of being Charlie, which seems like a stretch. He responds by telling her that she is Charlie, as he’s learned that she had a head injury at one point and spent plenty of time in the hospital. It also turns out that all of the victims were either people who cared for her or women interested in her father. So Lillian attacks Gerald with an axe.

As the two fight, the cops arrive and shoot our hero. As Officer Frank tries to help Lillian, we notice that she’s smiling like a maniac.

Larraz considered Edge of the Axe his worst feature film, but it has more quality in it than ten slashers. Seriously, I’ve been holding off watching this for a while, as I had always loved its poster art and felt it could never live up to it. Good news. If anything, it exceeds it.

Unlike most slashers, which are content to ape from Halloween and Friday the 13th, this film spends more time making us care about every character, even the side ones like Richard’s wife. This isn’t kids in the woods screwing around, making us count the seconds until they’re decimated. These are real people caught up in the web of a killing machine.

The killings themselves are bursts of the unreal that intrude upon the problems that all of these characters face — money woes, marital infidelity, family secrets — and that makes each of the very creative death scenes even more effective.

There’s a new Arrow Video blu ray release of this movie, which features a beautiful 2K restoration from the original camera negative. You can choose to watch this in English or Spanish (which also has newly translated English subtitles). There’s also commentary by lead actor Faulks and The Hysteria Continues podcast. Plus, there are interviews with Faulks and make-up artist Colin Arthur.

You can buy this from Arrow Video.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by Arrow Video.

The Kiss of the Vampire. The Return of the Fly. Rasputin the Mad Monk. The Face of Fu Manchu. Psychomania. These are the movies of Don Sharp, who worked at Hammer and eventually on TV mini-series. He was also the father of Massive Attack producer Johnny Dollar.

It’s written by Harry Spalding, who also wrote The Earth Dies Screaming, Chosen Survivors and, believe it or not, Witchery!

Back in the 17th century, the Lanier family buried Vanessa Whitlock alive as a witch. This came with the spoils of taking of their estate and earning the hatred of their neighbors all the way until the mid 1960’s.

However, two of their descendants, Amy Whitlock (Diane Clare, Plague of the Zombies) and Todd Lanier (David Weston, The Masque of The Red Death) are in love and getting married.

Meanwhile, the Laniers keep on building their gigantic estate, even bulldozing over an ancient burial ground, rising Vanessa from the dead and uniting her with Morgan Whitlock (Lon Chaney Jr.!) to kill the Laniers one at a time.

Things can only end with the entire Whitlock estate burned to the ground, at the cost of lives both good and evil.

Perhaps proving that 20th Century Fox was correct to place this and Devils In Darkness in a double feature Midnite Movies DVD set, both Victory Brooks and Marianne Stone show up in both films.

As a promotional gimmick for the U.S. release of this movie, posters warned the public that “Only the witch deflector can save you from the eerie web of the unknown.” Luckily, they could get one when they attended the movie and The Horror of It All as a double bill.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

Runaway teen Bobby Douglas (Stephen White, Gas-s-s-s) is given shelter by a cult of Satanists, but both his presence and questionable sexuality leads to conflicts within the group.

To be fair before we begin — The Church of Satan statement on homosexuality is that they “fully accept all forms of human sexual expression between consenting adults. The Church of Satan has always accepted gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual members since its beginning in 1966. This is addressed in the chapter “Satanic Sex” in The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey.”

Made by filmmakers from the gutters of Tampa on short ends as AGFA tells it — Joe Wiezycki also made the movie Willy’s Gone — Satan’s Children was made with students from the University of South Florida drama department.

Bobby escapes his father’s insults and his stepsister’s sexual suggestions — you thought incest only happened like this via Pornhub — to unknowingly end up at a gay bar. All the horror stories from Cruising are true — he’s soon having a train run on him in the grimy backseat of a car against his will. Yep, they drive all around while yelling things as they roger him, then leave him face down and ass up in a field.

So what would you do? Well, if you’re Bobby, you’d join a Satanic coven and get your revenge. After all, Florida may be the home of Disney resorts, but it’s also the birthplace of bands like Nasty Savage, Marilyn Mansion, the Genitorturers, Deicide and, well, Creed.

Everybody in this movie is too sweaty, too pale and too frightening to behold. This is all you need to know of Florida to beware of its darkness. The gay bars even look like a diner and not any place that I’d imagine them to appear like. Every scenario here is concrete block and wood-paneled, covered in years of filth, dust and scum.

The first time I saw legit non-Playboy VHS porn was a movie that later research would tell me was 1984’s I Like to Watch with Lisa De Leeuw, Mike Horner, Herschel Savage and Bridgette Monet. It was upsetting. The people looked too strange, too slovenly, too unsexy — exactly the opposite that I thought porn would be.

This movie brought back that queasy feeling, which kind of made me nostalgically happy for films that can still upset me. It’s wonderful to know that that can still happen.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or grab the double disk of this film and Satanis from AGFA/Something Weird video. You can buy it from Amazon or Diabolik DVD.