Westchester County played host to a veritable army of maniacs, including Ed Adlum (Shriek of the Mutilated), the FIndlays (Snuff) and Ed Kelleher (Prime Evil), who were armed with a camera, $24,000, some stage blood and cases of beer to pay off the cast. The result is a movie that seems like it could fit in with Motel Hell at first before you realize that these farmers are druids out to raise their queen from the dead with the blood of the stupid.

These Sangroids are bringing back Queen Onhorrid and they won’t let anyone stand in their way and that includes puppies. It’s a movie that doesn’t care if it’s shot in the day, the night or day for night. It is also relentlessly devoted to being weird without being a try hard movie. This is just plain weird.

Throw in an atonal soundtrack, the chunkiest blood you’ve ever seen and a woman in a glass case who gets to come back from the beyond and rule for all of 45 seconds and you have a movie.

If you watched Manos: The Hands of Fate and were hoping to find something just as odd and as poorly realized, this would be the spiritual East Coast sequel that you crave. If anyone else wrote that sentence, it would be a put-down. Coming out of my typing fingers, it’s the highest of compliments.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

Puppet Master 2 begins in 1990 as André Toulon’s grave is being excavated by Pinhead, who opens up the coffin and pours a vial onto his creator’s skeleton while Blade, Jester, Tunneler and Leach Woman watch. Soon, the skeleton raises his arms and Toulon is back from the dead.

Then, we return back to the hotel where Megan from the last movie has been killed and as a result, Alex is suspected of her death and is in an insane asylum. Nothing about the reanimated dog is mentioned.

Soon, the puppets are trying to steal away parapsychologists Carolyn Bramwell, who Toulon believes is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. There’s also a new puppet named Torch along for the ride. This one also explains why the puppets kill — they need brain tissue to stay alive. 

This one ends with Toulon double crossing the puppets in the hope of bringing his wife back from the dead. Like I said before, no one should screw with the puppets, not even the Puppet Master.

Strangely enough, the only reason why Leech Woman was destroyed in this movie was that studio executives at Paramount hated her. Another bit of trivia — look for Mr. Punch from Dolls on Toulon’s shelf.

Puppet Master II is the only movie that David Allen, who created the puppet special effects for the first film, directed. Check out our review of The Dungeonmaster to learn way more than you may want to know about this talented artist with a dark secret.

“A bloody trail of seemingly senseless murders leads a terrified young girl into a nightmarish web of police corruption and deadly, psychopathic madness!”

We haven’t had a killer judge on our site since we talked about Lindsay Shotneff’s — working as Lewis J. Force — Night After Night After Night.

Made in 1981 but not released until three years later, this is one of those movies where I have to use my scale of “Is it a giallo or a slasher?” It does have some attempts at fashion — which I’ll get to — but it’s grimy and near artless, with no attempt at a great soundtrack or color palette. So let’s say it’s a political conspiracy/woman gone wrong slasher, a hybrid that is pretty much a rarity.

There are also innumerable scenes of people eating in this, including one scene in a diner where a loud old homeless man dislikes his soup so much that he stands up and urinates in it before starting a fistfight.

One of that place’s waitresses — Janet (Pamela Collyer, Meatballs III: Summer Job) — has no money and a controlling low-level mobster boyfriend named Dino (Jack Langedijk, who was in the 2000 version of Left Behind). Her friend April (Nanette Workman, who sang backup for the Stones on “Honky Tonk Woman” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) suggests that hey, maybe she should try some hooking. After all, April has all of these fabulous outfits — her housecoats look like something Ric Flair would wear to defend the belt against Tommy Rich in Greensboro — and smokes all the time, so why not? Janet shares this idea over pillow talk with Dino and gets thrown out of bed naked, so she decides to stop being controlled and start selling her body.

Is this going to become a slasher soon? Just as I think that, a mental patient (Walter Massey, Happy Birthday to Me, Zombie Nightmare) kills a doctor and nurse and runs into the night.

Back to Janet being a hooker. Now, her friend April has brought her in to sleep with a rich client who looks like Rip Taylor and acts like Evelyn Quince. They’re attempted — and creepy — menage a trois is interrupted by the lights going out and the maniac killing everyone but our heroine, who the police blame for the killing. So in the question of giallo vs. slasher, Janet must now become the detective and solve this. However, she is not a stranger in a strange land and the fashion sense of this movie remains horrid, so we are still in slasher country, even if the mysterious killer has on black leather gloves.

Oh and hey — the cop who accuses our protagonist of the crimes is slasher vet Roland Nincheri (Visiting Hours, Terror Train). Suzanne DeLaurentiis, who produced the film D-Railed that we covered last year, is also in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jim Rex grew up in Texas then moved to Georgia when he was in his mid-20s. (He has remained in the south ever since.) He is not a movie reviewer or film journalist, just a guy who loves movies who keeps his wife up all night with the screams from chainsaw massacres and psycho madness coming from the TV. He misses video stores and believes the world would be a better place if we all slowed down and watched Tourist Trap once in a while. He appreciates Sam and B&S About Movies for giving him an opportunity to talk crazy about flicks he loves. 

2018 marked the 40th anniversary of probably the greatest story of teen chum in the suburbs ever told, the original, the classic, Halloween. The night HE came home, big, crazy Michael The Shape Myers. On Halloween night 1963 he stabbed up his sister Judith after she engaged in the fastest sex in the history of horny teenagers and then he did a stint in the juvie clink for terminally psychotic delinquents where he met a doctor crazier than he was and then he showed back up in Haddonfield fifteen years later on Halloween night 1978 to do the stick-and-stab boogie on a bunch of dumb disco teens who reminded him of his sister.

The flick was sort of a rite of passage back in the day. Kids were going to watch it to see if they could survive it. We were hearing reports of kids turning into puddles of Jell-O and having to be scraped off theater floors it was so dang scary. 

I was twelve when Halloween came out and mama refused to let me see it. She’d heard on the local Leo McNab radio news program that films like Halloween and KISS albums was steering teenagers towards hellfire and damnation. I reasoned that at twelve I’d be okay if it was just affecting teenagers, turning them into upside-down cross worshipping Satan-freaks. Mama wasn’t buying what I was selling, and daddy said he’d long learned to pick his fights with mama carefully, and he didn’t see any point throwing into the ring on this losing battle.

It killed me I couldn’t go see it but secretly I was kind of relieved. When word came down that a kid from Hill County Middle School was rushed to the hospital after he had a massive heart-attack at a 7:15 show Friday night show, I knew I shouldn’t push my luck. Up to that point in my life the scariest thing I ever faced was a long hot summer weekend at my grandma’s and she didn’t have air conditioning. I guess I could have sneaked in or got my uncle Tim to take me, but I tended to still listen to what mama said back then.

The next year they still hadn’t made a horror flick scarier than Halloween so they re-released it in theaters and you would have thought it was the first time. I don’t know what happened, but I missed it again.

Summer of 1980 hit and I had a lot more freedom in going to see movies, freedom in that I didn’t feel I had to ask mama about going to see what I wanted to see and she never asked so it worked out. A film “inspired by the true events of Halloween making a ton of dirty money” came out and it was amazing. Of course, I’m talking about the teen chum in the woods flick Friday the 13th. Gore and blood and boobs- whoa! It was a 90-minute blast of the cheapest of cheap thrills and I loved it.

This and a couple others like Terror Train, Prom Night and Silent Scream and I was hooked. I was now a full-fledged, frothing at the mouth teenage slasher movie fanatic. But there were all kinds of other great horror flicks coming out then, stuff like The Howling, Death Ship, The Fog, Scanners. It was a great time and I was at the theater almost every weekend seeing something.

Somehow, though, fate kept conspiring against me, and I never could catch up with Halloween. As far as cable, my daddy was always saying, “I pay to have the garbage picked up from the house, not dropped off,” so we didn’t have cable and we didn’t get our first VCR until 1983. (It was a glorious beast, big as an ocean liner, a top loader with wired remote.) So, there weren’t many options to catch up with it. Plus, honestly, with so many new horror flicks always coming out, there was always something playing to go see.

1981 come up on us and there was some buzz from my horror flick loving friends about Michael The Shape Myers returning to the big screen. I was out of the loop. Then Fangoria #15 came out with the grinning Halloween II pumpkin-skull on the cover and I was that 12-year-old kid again, dying to see the original.

As it happened, there was a big to-do about Halloween playing on broadcast TV, which coincided with the weekend release of Halloween II. I was determined to see Halloween II no matter what, so I was darn sure to have my butt parked in front of the TV on Friday night for the world premiere broadcast of the original.

I remember the night it filled up the screen of our 27” Curtis Mathes console TV like it was last night. It was Friday, October 30th, 1981 and it was a perfect night. There was a cool breeze blowing through the curtains, a little scrape across the windowpanes from the Live Oak just outside. It added just the right touch of creepy.

Me and my sister settled in with a big bowl of Jiffy Pop and ice-cold Big Reds for the flick.

Again, this wasn’t my first rodeo in Slasher City, but I knew Halloween was something different. It didn’t have a bunch of disgust-o Tom Savini blood effects, but it was definitely something that none of them other slasher flicks were, that being this was a bona fide scary dang movie. And when I say scary, I mean them little hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up shivering and ice water running through your veins.

We kept jumping in our seats and at one point, when that rusted length of gutter attacks Dr. Loomis in the Myers’ house,  I was so startled I let loose a popcorn fart that got us giggling through a block of commercials for Black Flag Roach Motel, Dr. Pepper and Frontier Motor Company’s used cars. I knocked over my Big Red and it left a stain on the carpet that remains to this day at my parents’ house.

The following night, Halloween, I went to see Halloween II with friends and with the original so fresh in my head I cheered as Michael The Shape Myers went after teens who not only reminded him of his sister Judith, but Laurie The Nerd Strode turned out to actually be his baby sister! (That’s what that business in the original was about when Loomis saw Michael had scratched the word “sister” onto the back of his asylum bedroom door.) Halloween II proved to be one of the best dead teenager flicks ever made.

When 1983 was showing up on calendars we had a VCR and I had a part-time job flipping burgers at Dirty Martins, so I went over to Palace Video, paid my membership fee and started renting little black boxes with movies in them.

I finally got around to renting Halloween. In fact, I rented the first three Halloween flicks for my own little movie marathon. Right away, though, about fifteen minutes into the original, I felt something was amiss.

The scene of the stuffy doctor talking to Loomis, saying Michael The Shape’s real middle name is Audrey, was missing! Immediately following that, the entire dang scene that totally explained what Michael The Shape Audrey Myers was doing was gone, the whole scene that set up the entire sequel and tied the two movies together so beautifully was M.I.A. gone, vanished and that was Loomis seeing the word “sister” scratched onto the door. The absence of these two scenes were too distracting for the longest, but then the movie seemed to be finished messing with me and I just got caught up in its magic.

I popped in Part II, but I didn’t think it worked as well with the original now. I don’t know. It was like two puzzle pieces from different puzzles that sort of fit together okay enough to go on to the next piece, but they really didn’t fit.

For weeks it haunted me. My friends were split. The ones remembered watching it on TV said I wasn’t cracking up, that those scenes were in the original. My friends who saw it in the theater said we were all crazy, that those scenes never were in it. I was perplexed, but I was a teenager and life went on.

Years went by and I fought being an adult, but I lost, and it happened anyway. At some point in the ’90s I’m picking up some favorite movies on VHS because, well, tape is forever, and I picked up Halloween. It didn’t look any different than it ever did as far as the box was concerned but after I popped it into the player, it was actually the version I’d seen all them years back on TV!

I had no idea why those scenes were put back in but there’s the stuffy doctor talking about crazy little Michael The Shape Audrey Myers and “sister” is scratched onto his bedroom door and then a scene I’d forgotten where Laurie The Nerd Strode agrees to loan Linda The Tramp her sweater for her date with Bob The Drinking Horndog. (You probably remember Bob The Drinking Horndog pulling and tugging at that sweater, trying to get to Linda The Tramp’s perky pups, and Linda The Tramp totally telling him to cool his jets and not to stretch out the sweater.)

Well, over time I came to learn this version of Halloween I got on video was the TV version specially put together for that world premiere television broadcast on the same weekend Halloween II opened in theaters in 1981. As for why it was released on tape, supposedly it was an “accident” where the wrong version was duplicated but considering Halloween had been around on videotape as long as there were movies on videotape, I never believed that story. That release caused quite a stir with horror fiends and everyone bought up that “accidental” release to have the different version with all those extra scenes.

At the time of the broadcast Johnny Carpenter and Debbie Hill said these scenes were necessary to make up for the running time of all the “rough scenes” that had to be cut out for the broadcast. Now, Halloween was never some gore epic and there wasn’t enough gratuitous sex and boobage to make a real dent in the running time once removed. All this got me thinking and thinking hard.

With how perfect and precise those extra scenes added to the TV version were, and how perfectly they played with Part II, it dawned on me like a sinner in church that a greater power was at work here, and that was the power of the almighty opportunity to make dirty money.

Yup, the classic teen chum in the suburbs fright flick Halloween had been pulled and pressed and kneaded and stretched like pizza dough until it was transformed into nothing more than a two hour long commercial for the release of the sequel, Halloween II!

This gave Halloween II a knife’s edge over the competition of every other gut-stabber being released at the time in that it had a two hour infomercial on TV for free that set up the entire plot of the second one, disguised as a NBC Friday Night at the Movies broadcast. (To drive this point like a crooked nail a little further, making the original film nothing more than a commercial was an in-joke in Halloween III. When our alcoholic hero with zero Halloween spirit sees a commercial for the original film on TV in a bar, here the original film is being used in a commercial to help promote the “big giveaway” where the 2,000 year old warlock villain wants all the kids to watch so he can melt all their noggins down into a torrential rainstorm of crickets, chiggers and rattlesnakes. Halloween was acting as a shill for another sequel once again!)

Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story realizing his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring only worked for deciphering Ovaltine radio ads, this TV version was only altered, and its entire plot shifted, so as to sell tickets to Halloween II.

Honestly, in the world of crazy cinema marketing techniques, this is probably one of the greatest marketing gimmicks ever perpetrated, if not the greatest, if only for the fact that nobody seemed to notice or even care. Carpenter and Hill altered their classic to help hedge their bets on folks wandering into a theater to see Part II on opening weekend and they were correct. Halloween II was the number one flick that weekend, taking in seven and a half million dirty bucks, which was some considerable folding money in 1981.

And, if we’re still being honest, the TV version of Halloween didn’t take anything away from it forever being a classic. Heck, if anything, it adds another interesting layer of history on the flick which very few flicks have. It’s not like when all them man-babies were crying in their mama’s basements that their childhoods had been suddenly rendered null and void after George Lucas started tinkering with the Star Wars flicks. Or when Paul Feig dared to change up the sausage fest of the original and cast his version of Ghostbusters with ladies, it had the same man-babies crying that their childhoods were based on lies all because something in a remake for a movie they saw when they were kids was changed around.

Whenever I hear that kind of nonsense I can’t help but smile and think, “Heck, Johnny Carpenter and Debbie Hill did that first, and no one even batted an eye that time they took Halloween and turned it into a commercial for Halloween II.”

For all we know of the movies of Lucio Fulci, how much do we really know about the man himself? What drove him to make films of such stunning cruelty? And what is meant in this film when they discuss that each film formed a mosaic made up of the tragedies of his life?

The conceit of this film is that an actor (Nicola Nocella) is getting ready to play the Godfather of Gore in a biographical movie, yet he must research the life of the man as well as his work. We never see the actual film that gets made, but is that even the point? We do get to learn plenty of stories of the director and attempt to get a richer image of who he was and how his life shaped and was shaped by his art.

Driven by new interviews with composer Fabio Frizzi, cinematographer Sergio Salvati, former actor and assistant Michele Soavi (an incredibly important artist in his own right) and Fulci’s daughters Antonella and Camilla Fulci, we discover how many of the stories of Fulci’s legendary hatred of actors and misanthropy are true. But a better image emerges as we learn of a man who hid his deepest emotions within his increasingly obtuse films. And we cannot forget that after a thirty-year career, the main films that he’s known for all emerged in a five year or less burst of body fluids.

Written and directed by Simone Scafidi (Eva Bruan), this is a movie that may not have much new for Fulci hardcores, but would form a nice starting point for neophytes to understand why these movies inspire such devotion. The interviews are the best part of the story, obviously, but if you have 2008’s Paura: Lucio Fulci Remembered, you already have around four hours of folks talking about him.

There is one moment of absolute truth in here, as the actor is meditating on the fact that producers wouldn’t even give Fulci a movie to make for the last five years of his life — other than his “rival” Argento, who was going to hire him to make The Wax Mask — and yet today, whatever movies he would have made would still be making money as limited edition reissues, bought by people like, well me. After all, I got this movie in a set with Demonia and Aenigma. I’m the kind of person who would buy a $50 version of Manhattan Baby. I am the exact audience for this.

That said, you can see how Camilla’s condition — she was in a riding incident soon after her mother’s death and further diseases weakened her (she has since died) — informs the reasons behind The New York Ripper‘s rampage, taking what would be a pornography of violence in a lesser artist’s hands and more of a vacant stare at an unfeeling void, shot at the dead center of the end of the world.

While the actor framing device never really works, the interviews and idea shine. The whole blu ray is worth it just for the extras, which include interviews with the director and crew, longer cuts of the interviews from the film, home movie and camcorder footage of Fulci scouting locations and even working on set and audio recordings of the director working with Michael Romagnoli on his memoirs.

I really don’t think that there can ever be a definitive Fulci biopic. Instead, we should look to his films — this effort makes quite the case for The Beyond, which I wholeheartedly agree is filled with messages — and wish that he had lived long enough to know that his name is spoken in the same hushed tones reserved for the greats.

You can learn more on the official Facebook page and order this film from Severin.

Puppet Master may have started with one direct-to-video movie, but since then, there’s been ten sequels, a crossover with Demonic Toys and a recent reboot, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich.

After Empire Pictures went out of business, Charles Band started Full Moon Productions, which would partner with Paramount Pictures and Pioneer Home Entertainment to create direct-to-video movies. Puppet Master would be first and it’s very similar to another Band movie, Dolls. Yes, this was originally intended for theaters, but Band thought it would make more money as a home release.

Think Star Wars is confusing? Well, Puppet Master is really the sixth film in chronological order. It starts in Bodega Bay, California in the year 1939. A puppeteer named André Toulon (William Hickey, Uncle Lewis from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) is finishing a puppet he calls Jester when Nazi spies come for him. He places Jester and the other puppets (Blade, Shredder Khan and Gengie) into a hidden panel before killing himself.

Fifty years later, psychics Alex Whitaker, Dana Hadley, Frank Forrester and Carissa Stamford take a journey to meet their old colleague Neil Gallagher, who has found Toulon’s hiding place, all thanks to a series of visions. Soon, a doll named Pinhead is taking out the psychic’s one by one, finally revealing that Neil has been alive all along using Toulon’s Egyptian secrets of alchemy to reanimate himself. However, he’s dumb enough to cross the puppets and throw Jester at a chair. Those puppets stay together. Only Alex and Megan survive along with Dana’s formerly taxidermied dog, which is now mysteriously back alive.

Such a small debut for a series that would go on to so many more installments, right? Even though they only have five minutes of screen time, people fell in love with the little guys. How can’t you adore Blade, who is based on Klaus Kinski and the Leech Woman? Strangely enough, most of the music in this movie comes from a movie Band produced that’s also about bringing inanimate objects to life, Tourist Trap.

You have to admire the balls of the makers of this movie. Actually, you can probably see them from space. They bought footage of Sir Christopher Lee from another movie and treated it as the beginning and ending footage in this movie, then said that the film stars the venerable thespian. Learning that a lawsuit would be long and expensive, he just had to fume. I wonder if he was as angry as when he walked out of A Bay of Blood?

Lee’s speech has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. Let’s all admire his plaid slacks, however.

Anyways, the real meat of the movie involves the death of a dog named Poopers, four college students killing one of their professors and lots and lots of paintings, then Morak, an evil force, comes out of the possibly dead professor.

You’ll be forgiven if this movie seems like it makes no sense because it doesn’t. And that’s probably why I liked it, because I watched it five drinks into a bender and it was perfect for that moment when alcohol goes from tasted wonderful to tasting like way too much.

This was probably made in 1975, but who cares? How many movies do you know where dead teachers command cacti from beyond the grave to kill their students? I can think of one and I’m writing about it right now.

Seriously, Christopher Lee spent as much time looking at contracts as all my favorite horror stars. Work is work, but I have no idea how he thought reading a script about a shaman convention inside a wood-paneled room was going to work out all that well.

Evan Lee made one movie. This was it. If he made any more, the world would have exploded.

In case you need to know just how odd and weird and whatever other descriptors you need for it, Ed Wood himself shows up in a cameo. Now that’s a guy that knew how to throw a non sequitur speech directly into a movie. Pull the strings!

You can watch this on YouTube.

Shot in North Carolina on short ends for $25,000 in a house that cost $25 to shoot in, Axe has risen above its humble beginnings to end up on the Video Nasties section one list. Writer-director Frederick R. Friedel dreamed of making a film by 25, despite never having been on a film set in his life. He also ended up playing the morally conflicted Billy, which was to save the expense of hiring another actor.

Originally released as Lisa, Lisa, this North Carolina regional film was re-released in 1979 by Harry Novak as Axe (it was also called California Axe Massacre in the UK and it also played as The Virgin Slaughter). While Friedel felt that Axe felt that Novak’s title didn’t have the subtlety, surprise, and irony of his intended title, it certainly sells better under that simply — and yet sinister — name.

Three thugs — Steele (Jack Canon, who is also in Friedel’s Kidnapped Co-Ed), Lomax and Billy — beat a man named Aubrey to death, but not before they make him eat a lit cigar. After seeing the carnage, the victim’s boyfriend jumps out the window. They follow this mayhem up by assaulting a shopgirl, firing a gun over her head and pouring soda all over her.

They end up at the farmhouse of Lisa (Leslie Lee, who is an otherworldly figure in this and sadly, stopped acting after this movie), who lives alone with her grandfather. She keeps them a secret even from the police and has even more skeletons in her closet, as she’s slicing herself in the bathroom when no one is watching.

That night, Lomax tries to assault her. She responds by slicing his throat open and cutting him to pieces with an axe and shoving him into a trunk. She convinces Billy to drag it upstairs and when he learns what is inside, she tells him Steele did it.

There’s a great scene here where Billy takes her into the woods and tries to tell her that he will protect her. She pulls out her razor and he thinks that she’s trying to give him a weapon to battle the more physically imposing Steele. The viewer knows better.

Steele is no match for her, as she soon dispatches him with an axe and serves his blood up as soup to her grandfather. Billy notices the villain’s ring in the broth and then the body magically falls from the fireplace, sending him running outside and into a gunshot from the cops who’ve come back.

Not a 100% slasher by any means, as we said before, the ad campaign and video nasty image of the Axe re-release give it a historic reason to include as a movie in our slasher month. This is the kind of movie where nothing happens for long stretches, only to have moments of extreme violence quickly destroy the narrative tension. It’s a really intriguing film and I wish that Friedel had made more than just four movies.

You can get this from Severin.