Director, writer and star Alex Knapp has created the story of Adam, the last man on Earth, who daily follows the same routine, obsessively checking off the boxes for what he needs to do, before discovering that he might not be alone.

A post-apocalyptic paranoid love story, Adam finds himself obsessed with K. (Olivia Luccardi, Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block), a woman who he once loved or who exists only in his mind. He begins to wonder if the wasteland he’s living in is real or in his head as well.

Who is stocking the shelves at the end of all things? Why does the water and utilities work in Adam’s apartment? Why are the go/don’t go boxes everywhere he visits? Why does the bowling alley still work? These are the kinds of questions that this movie will leave you with, beyond the metaphysical ones of why are we here and are we experiencing the correct reality?

Go/Don’t Go is available on demand now.

Based on Arthur Machen’s 1927 short story “The Islington Mystery,” this Rogelio A. González-directed (Chanoc, Dr. Satán y La Magia Negra) film is considered by many to be a classic of Mexican film, not just Mexican horror.

It’s the story of taxidermist Dr. Pablo Morales (Arturo de Córdova, For Whom the Bell Tolls) who is stuck in a dead marriage to the hypochondriacal and ultra-religious Gloria (Amparo Rivelles, The Nail). He’s dreamed of having children or even a moment of affection from his wife, who tells him that he smells of the dead.

Pablo finds another dream. He saves for a camera, but he gives the money to the church, so he must save up again. Despite his wife convincing the community that he’s an abuser and a drunk, he somehow finally gets his camera.

Mrs. Morales responds by breaking it.

That’s when too much is too much, so the kindly man kills his wife, dissects her and displays her skeleton in his storefront.

The priest is convinced that our protagonist is guilty, as is nearly everyone else in town, after Mrs. Morales has painted him as a drunk, a wife-beater and a general ne’er do well. That’s when this movie shifts into a courtroom film.

Well, Mr. Morales escapes the law. But he can’t escape God.

Screenwriter Luis Alcoriza was very influenced by Bunuel, which comes through in this. I love that Mexican cinema of the 1950’s — or at least my experience of it — is monsters and luchadors on one side and mind-bending art films on the other.

You can buy this on blu ray from VCI.

Known as The Panther Women, this Rene Cardona-directed lucha libre film really hits everything that I want out of movies. It’s got wrestling action galore. It has a Satanic sect of werepanther women. And it has an ancient curse. Seriously, this is the kind of movie that I dream of making.

This film is in the same universe as the Aztec Mummy films, Las Lobas del Ring and Las Luchadoras Contra El Médico Asesino. That is to say, it’s completely and insanely awesome.

A sect of Satanic werepanthers — they’re right in the title — are out for revenge for the warlock they worshipped getting killed a few hundred years ago.

Look out for the villain played by Tongolele, who set the screen ablaze in Isle of the Snake People! It also has Gerardo Zepeda in it, who plays El Angel*, who had been a pro wrestler for about 15 years before dedicating himself to acting, always playing “the mean bastard,” as he himself said, in movies like Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters, where he was the cyclops and a zombie. Plus, real life luchas such as Betty Grey, Marina Rey, Maria Guadalupe Delgado, Ma. Judith Mercado, Jesús Murcielago Velázquez, Cavernario Galindo and Reyes Olivia.

They could have made a few hundred of these movies — and they totally did — and I would watch every single one of them — and I do.

You can get this from VCI. They’ve also released it on blu ray along with La Mujer Murcielago, which you can get on Amazon.

*El Angel is a chemist, pro wrestler and crime fighter devoted to fighting occult forces. When asked why he wears a mask, he answers, “Because justice has no face.” He’s cool.

Miguel M. Delgado’s directing career stretched from 1941 to 1990 and along the way, he made 140 movies, including The Three Muskateers, Mr. Photographer and three Santo and Blue Demon films that put in the men in the silver and blue masks up against Frankenstein’s daughter, the wolfman and Dracula. Here, in the final of his three Santo movies, Delgado has unleashed Doctor Frankenstein’s grandson against the technicos.

113-year-old Dr. Irving Frankenstein (Jorge Russek, The Wild Bunch) is trying to bring his dead wife back to life — who he keeps in a glass case — and it doesn’t matter how many young women have to pay. What brings Santo and Blue Demon on the case is when he goes after their friend Alicia Robles (Sasha Montenegro, an Italian-born actress who is also in Santo in Anonymous Death Threat, The Man and the Beast and Santo vs. Black Magic Woman).

Frankenstein also has an army of zombies that either fight en masse or take lucha matches against our heroes, which are always the best parts of these movies for me. One of those monsters is named Golem, which is a great enough name, but then they give him a mask and he wrestles as Mortis. He gets a match against Santo and nearly kills him — Irving is his manager and also has on a mask — until Blue Demon spots one of the zombies in the crowd and figures out what’s happening. They chase Irving and Golem into the rafters high above the arena, where they of course fall to their deaths.

I’ve said it before and I’ll certainly say it again, but no genre attracts me as much as the Santo films. He’s such a perfect foil to be cast against all manner of genres, adversaries and themes. Even if you’re not a fan of wrestling, I urge you to watch at least one.

Pocketman and Cargoboy — from 2018’s Pocketman and Cargoboy — and Section 62 are back to face the threat of the 155 IQ man, Sir Longbottom.

This has been described as a kung fu adventure, but I wouldn’t go expecting Tony Jaa.

Beyond the name Longbottom, this movie has some similarities to the world of Harry Potter, as its young teens learning how to protect the world in a hidden school. It also has plenty of Spy Kids influence.

The weird thing is, this seems like a kids movie and then characters get beaten and bloodied and even killed. It gets pretty dark pretty quickly when it starts so light hearted.

That said, director and writer Clay Moffatt has worked hard for the budget he has. My only major pet peeve is that for a movie with such a short running time, this has about eleven minutes of credits.

The Rise of Sir Longbottom is now available on demand.

In 2009, director Quentin Tarantino placed JSA amongst his top twenty films since 1992. Directed by Park Chan-wook, who also made Oldboy, this film tells the tale of a fatal shooting within the DMZ that exists between the borders of North and South Korea.

At one point the highest-grossing film in Korean history, JSA is the story of the fragile friendship that starts between four soldiers who are on opposite sides. Yet why did two of the North’s soldiers get killed and why are the stories so inconsistent? That’s what a neutral Swiss team of investigators wants to figure out.

Sergeant Lee Soo-hyeok (Lee Byung-hun, Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies) is a South Korean soldier who has run back to his own country, rescued by his own troops and potentially guilty of shooting three North Korean soldiers, leaving two dead. He claims that he was kidnapped.

One of the dead, Jeong Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) was shot eight times, which doesn’t seem like self-defense. And one of the other South Korean troops, Jeong Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun), suddenly tries to commit suicide.

The truth is that for some time, the men had all been friends. In fact, the surviving soldiers and Woo-jin were attempting to protect one another, something that had been happening since Kyeong-pil and Woo-jin saved Soo-hyeok from one of their land mines.

Yet can even the truth — once discovered — save anyone? This is a tense exploration of the divide that exists between people who are not all that different.

This is a tense watch and one that will anger you by the close. I have no idea how to save the world. All I know is to watch movies.

The Arrow Video release of this film is available from MVD.

The Mummies of Guanajuato are real and are the naturally mummified remains of a number of people who died from cholera in 1833.  They were disinterred between 1870 and 1958 as relatives of these people could not afford the yearly tax for their burial and the bodies were mixed to a nearby building. For some reason, the climate of Guanajuato oftebn leads to a type of natural mummification, which led to these bodies — 59 or so are still on display — being shown in El Museo de las Momias (The Museum of the Mummies).

In 1970, El Santo battled these mummies, returned from the dead, in Santo contra Las Momias de Guanajuato and would return one year later to battle the trio of Superzan, Tinieblas and Blue Angel in El Castillo de Las Momias de Guanajuato.

Here and now, this movie seems to be a vehicle for Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, who have so often played second banana to El Santo. The team is in town to defend their tag belts — and for Mil to see his girlfriend Lina (Elsa Cárdenas, who was also in Madame Death) — when one of the mummies named Satan (played by Tinieblas!) awakens from his sleep and remembers that a hundred years ago, the ancestor of El Santo defeated him for his title and put him and these mummies to sleep. Right off the bat, we learn that the Santo we’ve known all along is a legacy hero like The Phantom!

The bad guys go wild while Blue Demon pish poshes the notion that Santo is needed. Soon, he’s kidnapped and an imposter Blue Demon is ruining his good name. That’s when the man in the silver mask gets the call, showing up in his sportscar and telling Mil, “Hey, I think I have a flamethrower or three in my glovebox.” Yes, after ten minutes of Blue Demon and Mil armdragging and chopping mummies, Santo just happens to have the solution.

What follows is astounding: a miniature flamethrower being shot repeatedly at live actors. If you watch that scene and don’t love this movie with all your heart, I have no idea why you’re on our site.

Director Federico Curiel made the Nostradamus vampire movies and plenty of luchador films, so he knows exactly what you want out of this movie. No fluff, no filler, just luchador on monster action. Viva El Enmascarado De Plata! Viva Leyenda de Azul ! Viva Mil Mascaras!

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

This is a movie that raises so many questions.

Here’s the first: Why did I list it as being made in 1968 and 1984?

That’s because it was originally Cautivo del Mas Allá (Captives of the Beyond) when it came out in the late 60’s.

In that movie, Rafael Portillo (who made the Aztec Mummy films, as well as the mummy parts of Face of the Screaming Werewolf) told the story of Vicki, who wants to be gorgeous, so a witch gets her to strip for Satan, who gives her the power of being a vedette dancer.

For some reason, Portillo decided to grab all the footage from that movie — which is more a romantic story with supernatural elements — to make a gore movie about Satan. You know, movies like this are exactly why we have a web site.

So let me see if I can make sense of this one.

Vicki (Ana Luisa Peluffo, who was one of the first Mexican actresses to appear nude, she’s also in El Violador Infernal, one of the most mental movies I’ve ever seen) is in love with Ricardo (Gonzalo Aiza, who also produced this movie, and strangely it is the only movie or movies that he ever appeared in*), who only has eyes for Barbara (Barbara Wells, who didn’t do much more than appear in John Candy’s Summer Rental and an episode of Lassie).

That’s when Vicki does what any of us would do. She sells her soul to the devil, who makes her man soft with any woman not named Vicki, which seems like a pretty dark bargain. They aardvark, but then a private dick shows up to say that she’s on the left hand path, which ends up with her stabbing poor Ricardo in the throat.

This is when all the new footage shows up, as there’s a funeral and Ricardo’s brother Carlos tells his brother’s ghost that he will avenge his death, so brother and possesses brother and sleeps with his Satanic sister-in-law, which seems like something people search for in late October on Pornhub. Then, Carlos kills her and has to go to court to argue the occult reasons why this all went down.

For some reason, Ricardo also shows up as a zombie that rips out people’s innards after a firing squad shoots his brother dead — after that court case — and has the sound effect of Vincent Price’s laughter.

This came out as Terror, Sexo y Brujería (Terror, Sex and Witchcraft), which is one of the best titles of all time, in theaters and Narco Satanico on VHS, which is also a great name.

Some of this movie will bore you into submission with long courtroom scenes, but stay with it. There will be moments of Satan in a Ben Cooper mask wandering a cemetery with fog all around him, as well as glowing graves, extreme gore and a mariachi band that has been dubbed to play synth.

Adding to the confusion of this film is that there are times — within minutes — where two different actors play the same character and time moves back and forth until you are confused beyond belief. The editing also has ADD, so there are times when you’ll just get flashes of things that have nothing to do with what is happening on screen or eyes getting superimposed over the footage, as if they forgot a layer or to delete something, but Photoshop and non-linear editing didn’t really exist in 1968 or 1984.

You know how some people get their doctorates by writing their thesis about ways that they plan on bettering the world? Mine is going to concern this film, explaining how two movies, made sixteen years apart, can use the same footage and tell two similar yet wildly different stories that bridge the gap between Mexico’s ripoff cinema of the late 60’s, which was still influenced by Universal movies from three decades before, and the VHS films of the 80’s, which saw Mexican filmmakers create Fulci-esque films with no filter whatsoever.

*This is a complete mystery to me, as well as the awesome The Bloody Pit of Horror site, which discusses whether this role is played by Gonzalo Aiza — as listed sometimes in the credits — or Carluis Saval, the name used on the 1984 version for Carlos, who looks exactly the same as Ricardo. Plus, is the producer Dr. Gonzalo Aiza Avalos the same person? What’s the story with Film-Mex Productions, who bought all this footage and hired the original director to make a remix? Was it all a front for Avalos to make himself or his son or whoever a star? And why is David Reynoso, who plays an attorney in this movie, holding a machine gun on the VHS cover art?

The SIgn of Death comes from way back in the past of Mexican genre cinema, yet director Chano Urueta would make movies the whole way up to 1974, including Blue Demon vs. the Satanic Power and the amazing El Baron del Terror (he’s also in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia).

Here, he’s putting Cantinflas* against several murders that seem to be Aztec in nature and all about sacrificing four virgins to Quetzalcoatl. What’s pretty crazy about this movie is that despite it being made in 1939 — a time when filmmakers north of the border were dealing with the Hayes Code and the feeling that cinema was destroying morals — this goes full on with topless women being murdered, like some forty years early slasher. Well, it doesn’t get that much into the gore, but you get my point.

*The actor is one of the biggest stars in Mexican film history, a comedian and hero of the people whose name as a noun meant lovable clown and as a verb means to talk too much but say little. He only made one movie that most Americans would know — Around the World in 80 Days — but he still has a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood.

You can watch this on YouTube.