You have to hand it to the producers of this film. Based on the book UFOs: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Emenegger, it was originally released with that title in 1974, then re-released in 1976. And after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they changed the title to UFO’s It Has Begun and put it back in theaters in 1979 and then again in 1981.

That’s ingenuity. Or grindhouse ingenuity, as it were.

Supposedly, at some point in 1971 Emenegger was asked by either the Republican Party, officials at California’s Norton Air Force Base or the Department of Defense itself to produce a film about UFOS using only official DoD and NASA source material. If he agreed, he was allegedly promised footage of a 1964 landing at Holloman Air Force Base (that footage is in this movie but the few seconds shown don’t prove anything).

The main reason I got into this was that Rod Serling hosts the film — from the grave, as he died in 1974, so as the film expanded for the 1979 re-release, they needed to add more actors to narrate — and starts it off just like The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, asking questions of our existence.

The rest of the movie features episodic stories of otherworldly events, such as a Lubbock, Texas event that is explained away as ball lightning, tales of ancient aliens punctuated by Burgess Meredith reading from the Bible, an appearance by Dr. Jacques Vallée, tales of how the Air Force, Pentagon and CIA got involved, animal mutilations and finally, a dramatization of alien visitors landing at Holloman Air Force Base and collaborating with the U.S. government.

Somehow, this movie was nominated for Best Documentary Film at the 33rd Golden Globe Awards. Other than the time Pia Zadora won the New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture Golden Globe, this would be the only time I ever cared about that show.

In a 2018 episode of Ancient Aliens,  Emenegger again told the story that the government promised to give him the Holloman footage, as well as the potentially apocryphal story that he handed Steven Spielberg a copy of the original UFOs: Past, Present, and Future film and that’s why the director made Close Encounters. You have to love when a huckster never stops being a huckster.

You can watch this on YouTube.

When major cities burn in the aftermath of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks, a disgraced doctor and her friends escape Atlanta for the refuge of her family property, which is nestled deep in the heart of rural Georgia. What they find there — more than just people, but also something perhaps from beyond our understanding — may be more dangerous than the terrorists.

Directed by Chris Ethridge from a script by Michael H. Harper, the heroine of this film is trauma surgeon Alison (Catherine Taber*, who is the voice of Padme in Star Wars: The Clone Wars), who has been suspended by her hospital. She takes charge and gets her pregnant roommate and boyfriend out of the city and off to her family’s hidden property, where her addict brother and her girlfriend show up just in time to kill another family friend.

While the human tension between all of the characters is the best part of this movie, it’s also a film that isn’t sure what it wants to be. Gritty end of the world military movie? Zombies in the woods? Strange lights? Possession? Ham radio evil voices film? Literal Biblical end of the world movie? It’s like the filmmakers threw it all in a pot and didn’t let it simmer long enough. At least Taber gets a chance to shine as her character and there’s some fun action.

You can get Haven’s End on DVD from Mill Creek Entertainment. It’s also available for purchase on Amazon Prime. Want to learn more? Check out the official site and official Facebook page.

*Ethridge, Harper and Taber also all worked together on the film The Morningside Monster.

Jess Franco wrote, directed, produced, acted and scored approximately 173 feature films and I have been cursed to watch all of them. This one, he made for French producer Marius Lesoeur and its also known as L’Abîme des Morts-Vivants* (The Abyss of the Living Dead).

I kid, actually. Sometimes, I kind of like what Franco does. This would be one of those times, when he somehow lulls you into a fuzzed out haze, helped by a bad looking print, as you wait and wait and watch and hope and dream of the moment when the zombies that guard some Nazi gold will emerge and kill the treasure hunters.

Tubi has a print that looks like a VHS that has been rented thousands of times, which makes this so much better of a viewing experience than a pristine version would be.

*It’s also known as Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, El Desierto de los Zombies, The Grave of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Living Dead and for having a Spanish version called La Tumba de los Muertos Vivientes that is blessed with Line Romay as the Nazi doctor’s wife.

On Halloween, two kids in a small town have awakened a monster known as Bloody Bobby from years of sleep. Now, they must survive, if they can! Black Pumpkin is written and directed by Ryan McGonagle, who also produced Bloody Bobby, which was the start of this storyline.

It’s a slasher with a synth score and allusions to Halloween. I mean, let’s not hold that against it. It has a ten-year-old child as a slasher and I certainly liked that angle, especially when he’s going against two other kids his same age.

Of course, there’s going to be another film in this series, Legend of Fall Creek, which the end of this movie sets up.

You can learn more on the official Facebook page. You can catch this on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

The sequel to the movie The Rizen — this was originally The Rizen: Possession — this film follows a group of urban explorers who stumble upon the door to a NATO and the Allied Forces secret lab where the occult was used to attempt to win the Cold War. There’s also a military unit looking for those arcane powers, but some doors were better left unopened, right?

The strangest thing about this movie is that Adrian Edmondson — yes, Vyvyan from The Young Ones — shows up as its narrator. He’s not in it as much as the trailer would lead you to think, though. But still! Also, Sally Phillips from the Bridget Jones movie is in this too, which is another person I didn’t think that I’d ever see in a Silent Hill style movie about occult military experiments.

Life is weird, everyone.

You can learn more this movie at the official Facebook page.

The Facility is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Yes, they let James Nguyen, the man who made Birdemic, film another movie. Somehow, he stretched stock footage out to sixty-six minutes this time to tell the story of Joe, a computer chip salesman who gets a new kidney from Dr. Evelyn Tyler, who he soon becomes obsessed with before she dies. Then, he meets her exact double.

If Birdemic is The Birds, this is Vertigo. Sure. Whatever you say, James.

There’s also cloning, which has the weird meta result of Evelyn’s clone becoming an actress and getting a role in Nguyen’s Julie and Jack.

Honestly, this is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen and I watch Jess Franco movies on twenty-four hour binges and have a shrine to Joe D’Amato in my basement.

Trust me, whether or not you like riffing on movies, there’s no way you’re getting out of this without help. I recommend the Rifftrax version on Tubi if you feel that you absolutely need to see the most insipid movie ever made about cloning.

What shall we call this movie? The Blind Dead 3? Horror of the Zombies? Ship of Zombies? Or The Ghost Ship of the Swimming Corpses? Let’s just go with The Ghost Galleon and know that it’s the third Blind Dead movie after Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Blind Dead.

Writer and director Amando de Ossorio is back, again pitting the former Knights Templar, now zombie horde against some swimsuit models and the rescue party that comes to get them. Now, they have the power to appear within the fog, taking over the ocean and killing all that they come near.

Jack Taylor, who worked with Jess Franco often, shows up here. He was in everything from Mexican films like Nostradamus and the Monster Demolisher to The Vampires Night Orgy and Pieces.

This movie is like being in a trance. A trance that has a flaming ship in a bathtub for a special effect, which is perhaps one of the finest trances to find oneself. The Blind Dead themselves are wonderful as always, but the idea that a sporting goods store owner could get publicity by stranding models and then somehow a galleon filled with the graves of Knights Templar who sacrificed women to Satan find them and take them inside their fog world and…ah, why am I complaining? That’s actually a perfectly logical plot.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

High school cheerleader Molly (Isabella Alberti, Triggered) wakes up drugged, bound and gagged in the trunk of her boyfriend’s car before she runs into the forest of Hangman’s Hollow, only to meet an urban legend. That’s right — The Hangman is a deformed monster who lynches any man that comes on his property and keeps the women as his brides.

Backwoods is just about the circumstances that led our heroine into her predicament as it is about the slasher killer. Unlike the majority of shot for streaming dreck that’s clogging up Amazon Prime, this film has actual cinematography, color balancing and ideas, which puts it (severed) heads and shoulders above that crowd.

Most of the same cast and crew on this — including writer/director Thomas Smith and producer/writer/actress Erin Lilley — worked on 2019’s Demon Squad.

You can learn more from the Fighting Owl Films page, the makers of this movie.

Backwoods is available on demand now.