This was originally called Tarnation, which may be a better title. That said, I really dug Oscar’s (Daisy Masterman, MurderDrome) story, as she must get over the loss of her man, her job and her cat by going to a cabin in the, well, woods to work out her life. Too bad there’s a demon unique out in them woods who needs her blood to bring Satan himself to Earth. Yeah, I wrote that.

Daniel Armstrong also made Fight Like a Girl, SheBorg and Nova Star, all films that tick the many boxes — pro wrestling, pretty girls, blood, ridiculousness — that are what we look for around here. For more films from the director, check out Strong Arm Studio.

If you love Evil Dead half as much as these guys, you should check it out, if only for the fact that there’s also a demonic kangaroo and sex so hot that it melts through the carpet. I’ve never seen either of those things before.

There’s also a rap battle with the hordes of Hell, band practice and lots and lots of blood. I mean, a lot.

While the poster for the new title is nice, check out this old one and tell me, don’t you want to see a movie with art like this? It’s goofy fun and you could do worse with your time.

This has been released on DVD and on demand from the fine folks at Wild Eye. They even sent us a DVD, which was pretty nice and hey, the quality of their plastic cases is pretty solid, which is more than I can say for most modern releases.

Zeynep (Filiz Akın, who starred in 116 movies in just over thirteen years and even survived being stabbed in the leg by an obsessed fan — she even went on stage to perform that same night!) is a mute girl content to be a florist with her father. They’ve been saving money for an operation that will allow her to speak, but one night five men break in, steal the money and kill her father. She refuses to testify against them because she wants them to all get away with it so she can hunt them down herself.

What really makes her story kind of Ben Parker tragic is that she falls for a man named Murat who teaches her how to shoot a gun and to defend herself with karate. He never tells her that he’s a policeman, despite being set up by his superiors to get her to testify. In what is either committing way too much to being undercover or just really taking advantage of his job, they get married. The five men? They show up and kill him.

Oh man, Turkish cinema, I love you so.

The bad guys in this film are so evil that one of them steals a baby and threatens to break its neck if anyone gets in his way. You will not feel badly at all, even if you’re the most liberal of left-leaning people, when they all get their karate chopped and bullet blazed comeuppance.

The really strange thing is that after the five men attacked Karate Girl, she could speak again, which really seems like a backward way of retelling They Call Her One-Eye. This one also doesn’t have the heroine getting assaulted or porn inserts, but it does have the kind of extended fight scenes that you come to these movies for.

With a name like Woman Despiser, you know that you’re entering the world of the giallo. But you’re not coming into it from Italy or Germany or even England, the home of Edgar Wallace, but instead, Turkey. The amazing thing is that this film comes from 1967, before Argento reinvented the form, so it really is closer to an Umberto Lenzi-style giallo or a German krimi.

A masked killer is murdering women one at a time, using the first letter of their first name and the initial letter of the district that he is in. He also wears different monster masks and has zombie hands and, well, there’s no nice way to say it — he assaults the women after he’s killed them.

I was shocked by that — and how Westernized the women were — which is way more than I expected from a late 60’s Turkish movie. There aren’t many on-screen kills, but the one — where we see the knife spray a young woman’s blood out of her throat — is memorable enough.

So yeah — miniskirts were all the rage here in 1967, as was the rock and roll. And murder, it seems. It’s hard to find a 100% original genre film out of this country, but darn it if writer and director İlhan Engin didn’t pull it off. It’s no The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but it’s not the worst black glove killer movie I’ve ever seen.

The fourth of five Tarkan films — based on the comic book barbarian created by Turkish cartoonist Sezgin Burak — this is a great place for anyone to enter the world of Turkish psychotronic cinema.

Tarkan was orphaned by Iranian nomads and raised by wild grey wolves. He travels with Kurt, a wolf, as he adventures in the service of Attila the Hun. Think of him pretty much as Conan and you can enjoy this film.

Tarkan goes up against a witch named Gosha who is revived by the blood of a dancer and a nun before using her evil powers to mesmerize our hero. She’s played by Sweden-born Eva Bender, recreating her role from 1970’s Tarkan and the Silver Saddle. She’s also in the Turkish version of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder.

Can Tarkan save Attila’s son? Can he resist the charms of Gosha? Will anyone realize that his wolf is really a German Shepherd? Who cares! Just relax, turn off your mind and enjoy this on YouTube.

The team of Çetin Inanç and Cüneyt Arkin create movies that make my head hurt so badly in the best of ways. Wild Blood, known by some as Turkish Rambo, is a movie that will own you. Buckle up, get your motion sickness pills and leave your ideas of what makes a good or bad movie behind — we’re going to Turkey.

Arkin plays Riza, a man who gets harassed as soon as he gets to town. He kicks their asses so badly that the army has to get involved. They were sent by a deformed man who blames our hero, but other than that, nearly every single scene and much of the dialogue of this movie comes straight out of Stallone’s second and more populist take on John Rambo.

It also isn’t afraid to outright steal the soundtrack of that movie either.

Unlike Rambo’s films, this movie also begins with an army of zombies menacing Emel Tümer, pawing at her in a scene that feels like it came from another movie, which is pretty much a compliment in this world. Except they aren’t zombies, but you could totally be excused if you wondered if they were. She responds by stabbing the leader of the gang with a tree branch and running away.

This is followed by the gang attacking Riza and him basically jumping off a cliff and surviving because, well, he’s Cüneyt Arkin. He lives in a cave and rescues the girl, but the wheelchair bad guy and a gangster blow it up and she dies, so our hero decides to kill everyone and everything and everybody.

You know when you would see a movie as a kid and then draw your own versions of it? Imagine if the paper you were drawing it on was coated with LSD and you have an idea of just how jaw-droppingly audacious this movie gets.

Inanç liked Rambo: First Blood Part II so much that he made it twice, following this movie with 1986’s Korkusuz (Rampage), starring bodybuilder Serdar Kebapçılar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Roger Braden runs the Facebook group Valley Nightmares, which is all about the history of the films that played at the drive-ins and theaters in his home state of Kentucky. He’s a great guy and I’m excited to read his take on this movie.

Originally a short film that impressed, creator Can Evrenol was able to acquire around $350k and given the go ahead to expand on his story and make Baskin his feature film debut.

And what a debut it is.

Released in 2015 to various, high profile film festivals, it didn’t open wide in Turkey until January 1, 2016. Filmed over 28 nights in his native Istanbul, mostly without permits, Evrenol’s story is tension filled, dark and violent. It’s a film that I feel fits into the best of Clive Barker’s twisted universe, mixes in some Fulci, and expands on it.

Our story begins with a child awakening during a storm, he’s scared and goes to his mothers bedroom door, but there’s a lot of moaning and groaning going on in there so he moves on out into the house. As the storm crashes, a zombie-like arm reaches up behind some furniture and starts to reach for the boy. The boy runs back to his mother’s door, pounding on it and screaming “Mom” over and over.

Fade to black, the title and opening credits roll. We open on a rainy night at a hole in the wall diner, a five man police squad (Yes, one of the officers is that boy now) are swapping stories and having some disgusting looking food. Things escalate between them and the owner and a local, an officer goes to the bathroom and freaks out, then they load up in their big ass police van and leave. As our guys are traveling down the road, a song pops on the radio and they start singing, and dancing, to a song proclaiming “They’re not afraid.” Just as the song ends they get a radio dispatch that a police unit in a town called Inceagac has requested backup and they accept the call. Heading that way, our driver states that Inceagac is a bad place, despite having many Temples there. The journey gets weird, there is an accident, a flashback to their time in the diner, and an encounter with roadside locals that inform them that they have arrived in Inceagac. Despite the locals warnings, they proceed on foot to the nearby ruin of a building where the backup call came from. Seeing their fellow officers car, silent, but with lights flashing, they realize this was a police station in the distant past, with a very bad history.

And that’s the setup folks, because once our guys step into the building to find their fellow officers and to see what’s going on, this film goes completely insane. It’s been a weird flick so far, steadily building tension while you try to figure out where it’s going. But you’re not going to expect what happens from this point forward. Because our boys have stepped into one of the gates to Hell, or a Hellmouth, or whatever you want to call it (a shitstorm maybe?!) and this isn’t going to have a happy ending.

I hate “spoilers,” so I’m not going to get into much story detail from here on out. But as our guys continue to stumble forward, and try to escape, the depths of this Hell continue to get more tense, violent and weird. I’ve used the word “weird” several times in this piece, but I’m not sure if I’ve said it enough. Don’t believe me, wait until you meet “The Father,” played by first time actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. This dude got the role simply because of the way he looks! And his setup and reveal is dreadful and horrifying!

This film hits all the checkmarks for me. Lighting, camerwork, story, acting, music, imagery… it all works. It’s bloody and violent, but there’s a lot left to the imagination, and that adds to the films overall tone. Evrenol does a fine job and mixes in some nice twists along the way, I especially love the final twist. This is very much a WTF movie. Multiple viewings reveal another angle (Se7en) that adds to the films enjoyment.

BASKIN streams everywhere, it’s on disc, I have the Scream Factory blu (which has the original short!) and I always watch it in Turkish! Many thanks to bandsaboutmovies.com and Sam Panico!

Yes, in 2017 more than one Amityville movie came out. There was Amityvllle Prison, Amityville: The Awakening, Amityville: The Final Chapter and this movie, which was originally called Amityville: Evil Never Dies and Amityville Toybox.

It’s a sequel to 2016’s The Amityville Legacy, a movie that features a haunted cymbal playing monkey causing all the terror. If you look close enough, you can also see Peter Sommers, the newscaster who also appears in Ouijageist, Ghoul and Meathook Massacre 4, so maybe there’s a shared universe of direct-to-streaming movies on its way.

If you’ve come this far into the world of Amityville, you know that this isn’t going to be a romcom. No, no matter what that house or whatever was in that house is going to change people and change them good. Or bad. You know what I mean.

The draw for this is probably seeing Mark Patton (the star of A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge whose story was the basis for Scream, Queen!) and Helene Udy (the original My Bloody Valentine and plenty of “The Wrong” cable movies, as well as the holiday film A Husband for Christmas).

Dustin Ferguson has been making and remaking horror movies since 2007, with titles like Nemesis 5: The New Model, Silent Night, Bloody Night 2: Revival, a remake of Die, Sister, Die!, Camp Blood 4 and 5, plus the upcoming Amityville In the Hood (the time has come, right?) and a remake of Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse.

Want to know way too much about Amityville? We got you covered with a deep dive into every single movie in the series. I’m still recovering. Check it out here.

This is out on DVD and on demand from the fine folks at Wild Eye, who were kind enough to send us a disk of this.

Translated as Someone’s Watching Me, this movie is better known in the U.S. as the Turkish version of The Shining. A writer brings his wife and daughter to a remote island hotel — instead of the Overlook — to inspire his writing. Of course, the last writer who stayed there killed his whole family, so things don’t look like they’re going to go all that well.

While Stanley Kubrick spent $15 million on his film, Ömer Uğur spent around $15. What does that get you? Handwritten credits on cardboard, that’s what it gets you. It also gets you Tarick Tarkan as Hulki, which I guess is Turkish for Jack Torrance and Selin Dilmen as Leman, who was a model and probably too attractive to be the Shelley Duvall Wendy analog, but let’s be nice. Their child is named Ufuk and yes, he does wear a sweater and no, it does not have an Apollo rocket on it.

Shout out to Murat Tolga Şen and his site Öteki Sinema, which is a great resource for all things Turkish film. He suffered through this as much as I did, so don’t expect this to be a great inspired film on the order of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

Whether you watch this under its true title or the translation Death’s Last Step or Last Step to Death or just prefer to call it Turkish Mad Max, I have to tell you, this is one of the greatest movies that I’ve ever seen. It somehow has everything I want in one movie — blood, brawls, black-haired thick thighed women kicking ass, stunts, stabbings and so much more. It’s as if the Turkish folks knew that someday I’d claim that Willy Milan’s W Is War and Mad Warrior rivaled even the most incredible Italian post-apocalyptic shenanigans and decided to raise the stakes. 1983, you were more than a good year. You were the best year.

Actually. the only thing making this like Mad Max is the leather jacket that Kaan (Cüneyt Arkin) wears. You may have seen Cüneyt in movies like Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, which is referred to as The Man Who Saved the World and Turkish Star Wars. Then again, maybe you don’t sit around and watch ten Turkish movies a day for several days in a row like I do.

A doctor of medicine, Cüneyt does all of his own stunts and has never played a villain in his entire career. He’s been in a ton of films obviously, but the best title of his films that I could find was 1981’s Zombi 65: The Water That Killed Everyone. He was also in Çöl, which some call Turkish Jaws, and 1984’s Ölüm savasçisi (Death Warrior), another mind destroyer that is pretty much a Turkish Sho Kosugi movie.

Emel Tümer, who was also in Çöl and Vahsi Kan (Turkish First Blood) is also in this as Leyla and she’s spectacular, outdrinking an entire bar full of men, fighting nearly every single one of them and even driving a huge truck while someone stabs her. She shows up at the end of the movie in a suit and fedora that stopped my heart cold. Seriously, Emel, where have you been all of our lives?

This is the kind of movie where the main good guy force feeds a bag of heroin to a drug dealer while the bad guy’s underage bikini-wearing girlfriend watched in horror. A movie with more butt shots and upskirts than a John Stagliano movie.

Anyways, Kaan (or Kagan, no one can agree on the web), Leyla and Ali set out to rescue a professor who has discovered the cure to leukemia. That means that lots of people are going to get killed in spectacular ways, ways that look legitimately painful and shocking in the world of unions, CGI and people trying not to die on film.

This is the kind of movie that will ruin all other movies for you. It made my head hurt in the best of ways, because it’s just too astounding. It never lets you get bored, throwing literally hundreds of bad guys at our heroes, who shrug off all manner of damage as if they are the living embodiment of the Contra Code.

You can watch the whole thing right here on YouTube.

I don’t care if you’ve made it through the collective worlds of Willie Milan, the Shaw Brothers, Godfrey Ho, Takeshi Miike and any number of film directors and creators and think you’ve seen it all. You’ve seen absolutely nothing because none of these creators would be able to create a movie quite like the absolutely demented world that Cüneyt Arkin has crafted. Trust me, over the next week, we’re going to share so many of his films, but it feels best to start here with 1984’s Death Warrior.

Think Godfrey Ho is transgressive because he mashes together two films at the same time? Cüneyt Arkin laughs as he makes every movie he has ever seen all at once, like those insane kids that didn’t understand that you can’t play with G.I. Joe, He-Man and your wrestling figures all at the same time because they’re all different sizes, but grown up and with a camera and a team of stunt people ready to die just to get all this lunacy committed to film.

This is why I love movies.

Beyond writing and co-directing this movie with Cetin Inanc, Cüneyt plays Murat, who is the Death Warrior. Years ago, he learned the ways of the ninja in Korea, after the war, and saved one of his sword brothers, who holds a grudge that this gaijin saved him so he’s spent the last few decades creating a gang of other ninjas who are destroying Italy. So the Italian cops decide to bring in Murat and unleash him on his one-time friend.

This plot sounds simple, but instead of delivering this Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow story to you straight, Cüneyt has created a film that mixes the neckbreaking zooms of Fulci, the nightmarish landscapes of Argento, the non-stop brawls of the Hong Kong films and the psychobabble of a 1960’s drug film and overfills 65 minutes of time with way too many ideas, like Jack Kirby when he was unleashed upon the Fourth World after a decade of pretty much making everything that made everyone say “Make Mine Marvel.”

Even crazier is that most of the footage in this film was originally used in 1982’s Arkin and Inanc joint Son Savasci (Last Warrior) but in a more linear fashion. Man, I didn’t know that they knew the Dada cut-and-paste technique in Turkey, but at the rate these guys were cranking out movies, I’m not surprised by anything, like how much of this rips off The Enforcer. These guys were making a hundred movies a year. I would have seen every one.

This is a movie that somehow has cars blasting through brick walls, ninjas who can use playing cards as weapons as if they were written by Frank Miller and trained by Ricky Jay, ninjas that are also zombies, evil plants, wizards, women that turn into frog creatures, a melty faced beast that is part vulture and a climax that offers a fight between Death Warrior and ninjas that is literally one third of this movies entire running time.

A normal person would think, “Is this too much?” Arkin and Inanc decided to throw in a bad guy who wipes out his own people just to show how twisted and powerful he is (by the way, in my dreams, he is in a support group with Maizon, the one-eyed cyborg werewolf from Mad Warrior, Velvet Von Ragner from Never Too Young to Die, Alby the Cruel from Nine Deaths of the Ninja and Tarzan from Intrepidos Punks), music stolen from Psycho and that aforementioned last final battle scored with the disco version of the Jaws theme.

The editing in this film is exhausting. You may never be able to watch another movie after this because it’s going to destroy your sense of pacing, your attention span and your understanding of how a speedball works.

Just stop reading all these words and watch this on YouTube and please write back to me and tell me just how much you loved this. My absolute highest recommendation.