Gabby (Leah Rudick) and Will (David Bly) are a couple that has been living together as they work toward their dreams of being a sculptor and a chef. However, their lives and even their relationship is going nowhere until they get “sweet parents,” or rich older benefactors of the opposite sex.

Oscar (Casey Biggs) and Guylaine (Barbara Weetman) become those benefactors, yet it all happens so naturally, as Gabby leaves the country with the older man to get more opportunities for her art, while Will’s brother pushes him to find a female patron and do the exact same thing.

By the time the movie starts, you get the idea that Gabby and Will have already checked out of the relationship and by the way he acts throughout the film, it’s pretty difficult to gain a moment’s sympathy for him or to even be on his side, particularly the way he acts on the evening where they bring the benefactors in for something like a double date.

That’s a big risk for David Bly, who wrote this along with Rudick. He also directed and plays Will in the film. That doesn’t mean that you’ll enjoy his character any more, but at least this feels like an honest film.

You can learn more at the official site and official Facebook page.

The films that William Grefé made in Florida feel sweaty and messy and filled with menace, just like the Sunshine State itself, the kind of place that could give you both the Happiest Place on Earth and bands like Deicide and, well, Creed.

This time around, Grefé is telling us the story of a group of three drug pushers who are no longer content to kidnap people and assault women. No, they’re in for the big score, killing their Cuban drug suppliers, an act that puts them on a one-way ticket to the kind of horrible end that can only be found in a regional drive-in movie.

Daisy (Jeremy Slate, The Born Losers, True Grit), Acid (John Davis Chandle, who is also in Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death and Whiskey Mountain, as well as playing the lead bad guy in Adventures In Babysitting) and Dum Dum (Willie Pastrano, who Grefé hired for The Wild Rebels and The Naked Zoo) are absolute scumbags that spend the majority of this movie doing horrible things and talking as much as they can to pad things out.

Look for William Kerwin — who you may know from Herschell Gordon Lewis movies — shows up as an FBI agent.

This movie can be found on the new Arrow Video He Came from the Swamp set that you can grab from Diabolik DVD.

This is what 2020 was missing. Giant cicada sucking the blood of humans so hard their heads explode. Sure, the effects are low budget and the story of four people coming together in the endtimes — who knew that they would involve giant bugs filled with sugar which somehow turns them into flying bombs — has been told before. But sometimes, you just need to turn your brain off and enjoy the silliness of a movie that dares to have the tagline “Kills humans dead.”

Writer/director David Willis understands just how goofy this all is and treats this story with none of the reverence that it deserves. After all, this is a movie where a disgraced baseball player and his exotic dancer girlfriend must come together with a scientist and a bartender to save the world. Or at least Los Angeles, I guess.

There are long stretches of people being destroyed by bugs. Some of you may think to yourself, “This really seems like way too much insect on human violence.” I’ll answer that by saying that if you watch a movie called Cicada, you shouldn’t just expect bug homicide. You should demand it.

You can learn more on the official Facebook page. Cicada is available from Wild Eye on demand and on DVD.

This was William Gréfe’s first script and when the original director got sick, it also became the first movie he’d direct. Shot on weekends, as Gréfe was working a full-time job as a firefighter, this is the tale of a rookie race driver named Bill Garrison being conned into murdering Rutherford, an older and richer rival, thanks to the machinations of an evil wife.

Consider this: there’s plenty of stock footage of races and several musical numbers with the ending kind of, sort of taken from Freaks. It’s not the best car racing movie you’ve ever seen and probably may vie for the worst, but at least it’s the start of Gréfe’s career as one of Florida’s top exploitation directors.

“Miami” Joe Morrison, who plays the young driver, would go on to be in Sting of Death and Racing Fever, while Evelyn King, who played the conniving Bo Rutherford, went on to be in a lost movie called Scream, Evelyn, Scream! As for Rutherford, he was played by Charles G. Martin, who shows up in plenty of Florida productions, such as Flipper and Gentle Ben.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tim Ochopee (Chris Robinson, who would write, direct and star in 1975’s The Intruder) is a war damaged Seminole just back from Vietnam that wants to live out the rest of his life in the Everglades with his snake Stanley. He didn’t count on Richard Thomkins (Alex Rocco), a maker of leather goods with mob ties, killing his father. Now, all the snakes that Tim has lived with will be the death of everyone who has done him wrong.

Only Grefe could take a ripoff of Willard and somehow make it more disturbing than you’d expect. Yes, this is a movie packed with snakes doing all manner of damage to people and people doing just as horrible things to them, including an exotic dancer playing a geek and biting the head off one on stage as she dances seductively with blood all over her bare chest.

Of course, Tim has to kill everyone in the way and kidnap Thomkin’s daughter Susie (Susan Caroll), but any hope of true love kind of goes the way that you’d expect in a Florida regional horror film that doesn’t stop with just stealing from one film and moves into being a reptile-obsessed Billy Jack.

That said — for a movie so much about protecting snakes, the actual snakes in this movie were defanged and some had their mouths sewn shut. There’s enough human on snake violence in this that you’d expect that it was made in Italy. Grefe still owns the wallet that they made out of the skin of the main snake that played Stanley, which is pretty weird when you dwell on it as much as I have.

Gary Crutcher wanted to do a sequel called Stanley in Miami, but it didn’t happen. He wrote this on two days under the influence of amphetamines, which is the most Florida thing you can say about a movie that is the most Sunshine State movie I’ve seen.

If you didn’t have enough of teenagers in the Everglades screwing with forces they didn’t quite comprehend in Grefe’s Sting of Death — which was the other part of a double bill with this film — then good news! Four students on an archaeology assignment decide that it would be a great idea to have a shindig on the grave of Tartu, an ancient Native American medicine man.

Frank Weed, who played Sam in this, owned all of the animals that Tartu comes back from beyond within. He did not own the stock footage that was also used for some of these animals, nor his own voice, as he was dubbed for this movie.

Somehow, Tartu has the power set of your average mummy villain, except you know, he turns into animals. One of those animals is a “lake shark,” which I had to look up, and learned that true freshwater sharks can be found in fresh water in Asia and Australia, as well as bull sharks, which can swim in both salt and fresh water and are mostly found in tropical rivers. Actually, bull sharks have been found as far north as Illinois. Yet another reason why the Everglades are totally terrifying.

Why Tartu’s weakness is mud — when he makes his home in the Florida swamps — is beyond me. Man, who knows? This is kind of a nature film, you know, except for all the killing of teens after they dance. It’s got a great name. an awesome poster and really, isn’t that all it needs?

If you want to see it for yourself, you can find this movie on the new Arrow Video He Came from the Swamp set that you can grab from Diabolik DVD.

A palindrome is a word or a story that can be read the same forward or backward, which is the idea of the multiple stories within this film. At the same time, it may be about a painter named Anna who becomes famous at a very personal cost while Fred, a patient in a psychiatric facility, is obsessed with saving Anna frombeing killed.

So what is the story about? Is it Fred trying to find a way toward sanity or Anna realizing that she must destroy herself? Or both? Or are they just two sides of the same story? This movie doesn’t give you any answers.

Also: what do the mysterious turn of the last century nurse and doctor have to do with all of this?

If you’re the kind of person who throws their arms up and gets angry at the artier side of film, then this movie isn’t for you. If you’re willing to put an investment into watching something and coming away with your own impression of what the artist was attempting to share, then you may very well enjoy your time here.

This is a movie that doesn’t just try to tackle one issue, but many, and at times it’s scattershot, but that could also be its charm. But like I said, your experience may vary.