The Hunt has often been a punchline in the emails between this site’s R. D Francis and myself, as we’ve discussed many times how bad the film appeared from trailers and whether or not the controversy was just made up to get rid of a movie that did not appear ready for theaters.

When the COVID-19 epidemic finally pushed this out — anything that is in the can and could be released is being shown — I finally got my chance to see just how bad — or good — this movie was.

Directed by Craig Zobel — who helped created Homestar Runner — from a script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, this movie reimagines The Most Dangerous Game for the nightmare hellworld that we find ourselves navigating every day.

The movie was originally called Red State Vs. Blue State and so upset President Trump that he referred to it as “”Liberal Hollywood” being “[r]acist at the highest level” and stating, “The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”, and “They create their own violence, and then try to blame others.”

Nobody cared.

I mean, this is a movie that has Sturgill Simpson play a character named Vanilla Nice. That’s the extent of its humor. And the idea that perhaps there’s no right side in this war is pretty much wasted so that Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank can have a fifteen-minute fistfight.

The whole beginning of this movie feels less like a film and more like watching someone else play PUBG, with numerous deaths happening with no consequences or emotions.

It’s closer to a slasher, some would say, but most slashers are entertaining.

Imagine if The Purge, but remove all the over-the-top ridiculousness and square up reel moralizing — as well as most of the fun — and you have this movie.

Look, Hard Target, Turkey Shoot and Surviving the Game are already much better cover versions than this. They just didn’t have a ton of money behind them and all manner of hype that they didn’t deserve.

A  butcher and his twin sister have gone to Australia to find their birth mother, but what they end up finding is a small town that has a carnivorous — and yes, cannibalistic — secret. Two Heads Creek lets you know that it’s a quality, fun romp right from the beginning with great credits and well-done camerawork. This is no basic straight to streaming time waster.

I’d never heard the Skyhooks song “Horror Movie” before, but this 1975 Australian song is featured throughout the movie and really sets the tone.

The end of this movie has more spraying blood and gore than the last four or five movies I’ve seen put together, as an Australia Day celebration goes the way of Two Thousand Maniacs.

You can grab this release — from the Horror Collective — on all streaming platforms. If you want to learn more, visit the official site.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie to review, but that has no impact on what we think of it.

Directed by Stuart Paton, this was the first attempt at ever filming Jules Verne’s novel. It also includes elements of his story The Mysterious Island. It was also the first motion picture filmed underwater, which was the role of the Williamson Submarine Film Corporation in the Bahamas. While they did not use actual underwater cameras, they instead made a system of watertight tubes and mirrors that shot reflected images of underwater scenes that they staged in shallow waters that were brightly it by the sun. It’s a pretty amazing magic trick.

Adding to the history of this movie, it was made by The Universal Film Manufacturing Company, which eventually became Universal Pictures. While they weren’t a major player yet, they still raised the money for the movie’s special effects, on-location shooting, huge sets, exotic costumes, fully-built ships and a life-size staging of the surfaced Nautilus. In all, this took two years to make and cost the studio $500,000 (which would today be about $19 million dollars). That cost — which kept the film from making any money — kept studios from making another Verne film for more than a decade.

38 years later, when Disney remade this movie, they came to the exact spot in the Bahamas. That’s because the water was so clear that it made for a perfect shooting location.

If you’d like to own this piece of history, it’s just been released by Kino Lorber on blu ray. It also has commentary by film historian Anthony Slide. I loved every minute and I have a feeling that you will, too.

Also known as Vivre Pour Survivre and Le Diamant, White Fire is a movie that is crazy from literally first few moments of the movie, where Bo and Inga (soon to be played by Robert Ginty from The Exterminator and Belinda Mayne from Alien 2: On Earth) watch as their father is burned up by a flamethrower and their mother shot in the back. Fast-forward a few decades and now they’re jewel thieves who are after White Fire, a diamond so hot that it sets people on fire when they grasp it. Oh yeah — they have the hots for each other.

I can’t even begin to explain the story of this movie, where Bo recreates his soon-to-be dead sister by having a prostitute get plastic surgery so that he can finally sleep with his sister, I mean, get revenge. The only trouble is that this new sister is wanted by Noah Barclay (Fred Willaimson!), who has to take her back for his boss.

This is the kind of movie that randomly throws a chainsaw fight in ten minutes in and you wonder, how can this top that? And it does. Again and again, it does, including diamond mine workers who have accessorized leather belts straight out of the disco era. Even better, Mirella Banti (Tenebre, D’Amato’s Top Model 2) is a completely heartless villain.

Gordon Mitchell is here, which makes sense, seeing as how this film — like many of the Eurospy movies he was in — is a United Nations-like effort, uniting Turkey, Italy, France and America to make one of the oddest films that has graced by blu ray player in a while.

Director Jean-Marie Pallardy was a male model before becoming a director. I love how his credit is his signature, as if this was going to be something classy. Then I remembered that Harry Novak did the same exact thing. Most of Pallardy’s work was in the soft core genre, but seriously, the dude is a maniac. This movie is fetishy as hell.

And check out this theme song by Limelight.

Arrow’s new release of this film is pretty much perfect, with a 1080p high def version of the movie, interviews with the director, editor Bruno Zincone and Williamson, and commentary by Kat Ellinger.

This gets my highest recommendation. Please watch this movie — where Turkish oil wrestling is background noise and not even a highlight — so we can discuss just how out of control it is.

You can get this from Arrow Video.

If you have ever had a nightmare of being abducted by aliens, maybe avoid this movie. It’s harrowing and has one of the most brutal alien encounters scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.

Based on Travis Walton’s book The Walton Experience, which describes a “this really happened” extraterrestrial encounter, this movie features D.B. Sweeney as the author and Robert Patrick plays his brother-in-law. It also may be the second time Henry Thomas met an alien, but trust me, this one doesn’t go as well.

November 5, 1975. Snowflake, Arizona,. Loggers Travis Walton (Sweeney), Mike Rogers (Patrick), Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer, One Tree Hill), David Whitlock (Peter Berg, Very Bad Things), Greg Hayes (Thomas) and Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg, Class of 1999) are out in the woods when a UFO blasts Walton away to, well, somewhere and the other men are accused of murder by Sheriff Blake Davis (Noble Willingham) and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner).

However, Walton shows up alive days later, suffering from flashbacks to the nightmare that he has survived, one that no one believes. However, the filmmakers thought the real Walton’s story was boring, so they embellished. And by embellished, I mean they went into nightmare crazy world and made a movie that still scares me every time I watch it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie holds the distinction of being some of Rick Baker’s first work. Made in Mexico, it was directed by Harry Essex, who wrote It Came from Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon. 

Dr. Rick Torres (Kerwin Mathews, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) and Susan Lowry (Pier Angeli in her final film, as she died during production of the film) has found not just too much radiation in the waters of a small Mexican town, but also a mutant octopus that can crawl on land.

The mainstream science community scoffs at this notion, so Torres must work with circus owner Johnny Caurso (Jerome Guardino, who in addition to acting, as also the second-unit director from Grave of the Vampire and Dream No Evil), who wants to take the octopus on the road.

There’s some ridiculousness here with David Essex (The Cremators) as Davido, a Mexican Indian who shares the legend of the half-serpent, half-man that lives in these waters. He’s able to escape just about any predicament due to his magical native powers.

The man in the Octaman suit was Read Morgan, who was The Car, Blood Beach, Dudes, Hollywood Hot Tubs and more. The suit was so fragile and the vision so limited, that led to the shambling, near drunken way that the creature moves.

Even if you haven’t seen this movie, you’ve seen it. In Fright Night, Peter Vincent shows the final scenes — where beauty does indeed kill the beast — as being from a movie called Mars Needs Flesh.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Jack Smight directed Rod Steiger in this film and in the incredibly dark The Illustrated Man, a movie that he bought the rights to film from Ray Bradbury. He’d also direct Airport 1975 and Damnation Alley.

George Segal, who is the hero of this film, told the Chicago Tribune, “It’s Steiger’s film. He runs around doing all sorts of different roles and I just stop by and watch him.”

He isn’t wrong.

Christopher Gill (Steiger) is obsessed with his late mother, a theater actress whose shadow still weighs on him long after her death. He hates her so much that he keeps killing versions of her again and again, using acting to win over the elder ladies before snuffing their lives out and leaving lipstick all over their faces.

Detective Morris Brummell (Segal) is the cop trying to find the killer, but he’s beaten up by his mother constantly and falling for Lee Remick. Who can blame him?

This was originally a William Goldman novel. Plenty of films have been, including Magic, The Princess Bride and Heat. He also wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, Misery, Dreamcatcher and The General’s Daughter.

This movie was playing in Vallejo, California in April 1969. That’s when the Zodiac Killer was murdering his initial victims. It’s believed that the Zodiac loved movies and that he may have been influenced by the way that the killer in this movie taunted the cops.

This is one of Becca’s favorite movies, which is another of the many, many reasons why I love her so much.

Here’s the official description of this film from the fine folks at October Coast: “Weekend campers, an escaped convict, young lovers and a police officer experience a night of terror when a hostile visitor from another world descends on a small Arizona town.”

As for the title of this film, it doesn’t make sense until the end, which comes out of nowhere for a movie that up until then has felt like Without Warning 2020.

We covered director Joseph Mbah’s film Expo on the site and as I was looking back on it, I remember that I called out that that film had more than ten minutes of credits. This one started with nearly three and ends with eleven minutes or more. So, if you love credits, good news!

I really liked the design of the alien monster in this, which felt very 1950’s science fiction. I was expecting to not see any creatures in this, so I was pleasantly surprised to have so many creature effects.

Battlefield 2025 is available on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment, who was nice enough to send us a copy to review.

As a new student at an all-girls boarding school, Manuela has started to fall in love with her teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg. Manuela is played by Hertha Thiele, whose career, according to German film historians Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramman , was shaped by the fact that “her acting success may well have been based upon her image which met the homoerotic desires of both men and women, though perhaps more those of women.”

What’s even more astounding is that this tale of illicit first lesbian love was made in Germany during the Third Reich. It’s also an incredibly anti-fascist film made right under their noses.

Screenwriter Christa Winsloe based this movie on her life. Directly on her life, that is. Theile shared, “The whole of Mädchen in Uniform was set in the Empress Augusta boarding school, where Winsloe was educated. Actually there really was a Manuela, who remained lame all of her life after she threw herself down the stairs. She came to the premiere of the film. I saw her from a distance, and at the time Winsloe told me “The experience is one which I had to write from my heart.” Winsloe was a lesbian.”

The movie made its way around the world — Japan, the United States (where it was first banned, then released in a censored version after Eleanor Roosevelt championed it), England and France — before it was banned in Germany until a pro-Nazi ending was added. Finally, the film was just as seen as too decadent and banned again.

You can get this new release — as well as Victor, Victoria which we’ll get to tomorrow — from Kino Lorber. The blu ray comes compete with commentary by film historian Jenni Olson.