This movie follows Justin McConnell (Lifechanger) over five years in his life and career as an independent filmmaker, as he continually asks himself, “How does an indie filmmaker survive in the current film business?”
Beyond the story of McConnell, this has plenty of quotes and advice from an army of filmmakers, actors and others behind the scenes, including Guillermo del Toro, Mick Garris, Paul Schrader, Lloyd Kaufman, George Romero, Brian Yuzna, Larry Cohen, Tom Holland, John McNaughton, Uwe Boll, Sid Haig, Jenn Wexler, Don Mancini, Frank Henenlotter, Charles Band, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley, Dean Cundey and so many more.
This is more than just a documentary. It feels like an essential watch for anyone thinking about making a film. With so many of the films that we watch, we only see the end results on screen. There is so much more that we will never know and work we can’t imagine, which makes me think more about how I write when I discuss these films. No matter how down and dirty some movies are, they are someone’s labor of love.
You can learn more at the official site. This is available on demand from Gravitas in the U.S. and Indiecan Entertainment in Canada, and will be released on blu ray from Arrow Video for the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they will release it on blu ray.
Danger…! Women in Action is all about René Cardona Jr. trying whatever it takes to entertain you and take your money. Starting with 1964’s Las Hijas de Elena, the son of the director of movies* like Santa Claus, Survive! and Zindy the Swamp Boy would direct 99 films of his own — someday, I’ll write a song called “44 Lines About 99 René Cardona Jr. Films” — that are some of the most berserk movies I’ve seen, such as Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Tintorera: Killer Shark and Night of 1000 Cats.
The sequel to 1967’s SOS Conspiracion Bikini, this adventure finds Alex Dinamo (Julio Alemán, who also played the superhero Rocambole) and the mostly female agents of Secret Organizational Service (S.O.S.) — which is pretty woke for a Eurospy movie, as even the top brass of this spy group seem to be women — stop terrorists from destroying oil fields, damaging manufacturing and even poisoning Miami’s drinking water.
Alma Delia Fuentes (Dr. Satan), Elsa Cárdenas (who was in The Mummies of Guanajuato as well as The Wild Bunch and Giant), Amadee Chabot (a former Ms. California 1964 who was in the Matt Helm movies Murderer’s Row and The Silencers, as well as Agente 00 Sexy, the Santo as a spy movie El Tesoro de Moctezuma, the Capulina and Chespirito as spies caper Operación Carambola, the Nick Adams as fake Bond flick Los Asesinos and the strange and wonderful Las Sicodélicas; she has all the qualifications to be a Bond girl yet sadly only appeared in the movies inspired by 007**), Barbara Angely (Chanoc and Click, Fotógrafo de Modelos), Nadia Milton (Santo vs. the Head Hunters) and Jessica Munguía (who was in 1966’s Santo movie Profanadores de Tumbas, which is also called Grave Robbers and has nothing to do with Ladrones de Tumbas, which is also known as Grave Robbers in the U.S.) all appear in this film.
One of the few other male agents is S.O.S. Agent Jack (César del Campo, who can boast of being in a magical art film like Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and several Santo films), who is known as El Hombre de la Mano Dorada (The Man with the Golden Hand), which is genius, as it combines one Bond book title (The Man with the Golden Gun) and does Goldfinger three fingers and a thumb better.
Also, because this is one of René Jr.’s movies, look for an extended scene of SCUBA diving with a gorgeous woman coming up against a shark. The dude knew what his audience wanted, you know?
*The Cardona bloodline continued with René Cardona III, who has kept up the maniac zeal of his forebearers with stalwart entries such as Vacaciones de Terrorand Pesadilla Fatale. He also acts in several movies, including playing the aforementioned Zindy for his grandfather, in Cyclone and Bermuda Trianglefor his father and Cementerio de Terror for another second-generation director, Rubén Galindo Jr.
**She no longer plays a secret agent, but is a Century 21 agent.
The Witch’s Mirror is why I love 1960’s Mexican horror. Some movies of that era only hint at witchcraft and the occult and this one goes full in, showing rituals and all manner of Satanic mayhem. Ah, Mexico. Long may your movies live on.
It’s directed by Chano Urueta, who also made the confoundingly wonderous El Baron del Terror and the Blue Demon films.
If you’re going to steal, I always say to steal big. Chanto takes from so many sources here — Edgar Allan Poe, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Eyes Without a Face — while somehow synthesizing them into his own out there narrative.
Deborah (Rosita Arenas, Xochitl from the Aztec Mummy movies) is the new wife of Dr. Eduardo Ramos (Armando Calvo), but she has no idea that years ago, he poisoned his first wife, Elena (Dina de Marco).
The thing is, Elena may be dead, but her spirit will not rest. She calls out to her aunt, a witch named Sara (Isabela Corona), whose spells and incantations place Deborah directly in the path of revenge, starting with her face being burned in a fire.
Luckily — or maybe not — Dr. Ramos ends up being somewhat of a mad scientist, so he starts stealing dead bodies to take their skin and attempt to give his new bride her beauty back.
Somehow, in all of this, the witch comes off the best of all of them. This movie is nightmarish in ways that movies made outside of Mexico just can’t pull off, because I get the idea that the filmmakers have one foot in believing that everything in this movie is possible.
You know, Rene Cardona could have made a million of these wrestling horror movies, K. Gordon Murray could have brought them all to the United States and I would still watch every single one of them over and over again.
Cardona had made this under the Las Luchadoras title* and Murray changed it to Doctor of Doom, re-editing and dubbing it for American audiences.
An evil doctor has an army of gangsters and a man-ape named Gomar (Gerardo Zepeda) that wears a bulletproof vest, but come on, he’s battling the wrestling women and is always going to come up short.
This was an American-International Pictures film that was sold to television, so if you were a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, there’s a great chance you saw it and were incredibly lucky.
The biggest mistake that the mad scientist makes is kidnapping and using the sister of pro wrestler Gloria Venus (Lorena Velazquez), who brings her tag partner Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell) and the police to destroy his schemes.
You know who loved this movie? Rene Cardona, as he spun Lorena Velazque’s character off to star in Las Luchadoras Contra La Momia and Las Lobas Del Ring. Then he remade it with more skin and gore as the even more amazing Night of the Bloody Apes, a film that made the Section 1 video nasties list nearly a decade after it was made, which in my mind is a wonderful accomplishment.
*There’s also another version named Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women Vs. the Aztec Ape that has a rock ‘n roll soundtrack.
You know, for two genres that have so many movies, westerns and horror don’t cross over nearly as much as they should.
Director Alfredo B. Crevenna (Aventura Al Centro de la Tierra , El Planeta de Las Mujeres Invasoras) and writer Alfredo Ruanova (Blud Demon: Destructor de Espias, the Neutron movies) team up to tell the story of the two centuries old Rio Kid, who has taken up residence in a western town to draw out other gunfighters, murder them in cold blood — or duels, really — and then drink their, well, blood to gain their gunfighting skills. It’s a pretty great scam he has going and the townspeople all love him because he’s saved a few of the women from some of the rougher men out there.
Meanwhile, a guy named Texan, who is el hijo of a pretty well-known bandito, joins up with an old man named Nestor who was in jail because of the villainous Rio Kid, and the Rivero brothers all head to San Jose to see if they can take out the bad guy.
With a title that translates as Ghost Town, you know what you’re getting into. The townspeople have a song that drives Nestor to violence, the vampire has the longest fangs you’ve ever seen and it seems like Gunsmoke meets a Universal monster, which really is the episode of that venerable TV series that I always longed to see.
Some people get excited about the latest Marvel or DC movie. Others can’t wait for the next Star Wars. But when it comes to the movies that I look forward to, they’re often ones that slip under the radar. My goal is to change that under the radar status of this movie.
From the moment I saw the first trailer for this, I knew I was in for something special. After all, director Steven Kostanski was behind Manborgand The Void, one of my favorite movies of the past few years.
Now, he’s created Psycho Goreman, a movie that takes the energy and over the top gore of the straight to video era without wallowing in nostalgia. Basically, this is a movie for kids that no kid should see but they should totally see, a film that reminds me of the thrill from being the only kid in class who had seen The Pit and The Gate. This movie is packed with practical effects, singalong montages, brutal battle scenes, so many monsters and the best gore I’ve seen in years.
I smiled throughout this entire film. If someone made a movie just for me, this would be it.
The Arch Duke of Nightmares — the being who will one day be known as Psycho Goreman — has been exiled to Earth in the wake of a battle between his armies of evil and the the Templars, a religious sect out to purify the galaxy which just might be — spoiler warning — worse than the destroyer of worlds that has been exiled to Earth.
The Gigax Council — led by Pandora, the Prime Templar Crusader (Kristen MacCulloch) and made up of Kortex (Matt Kennedy, who directed The Editor and Father’s Day), H.I.S.S. (which stands for Hyperion Isolde Sepintine Sorceress), Dr. Meganoid, Tube-Man ), Star Stryker 77, Allan and the Judicator — have defeated the most evil creature to ever walk any planet and separated him from the jewel that gives him his power.
Meanwhile, down on our doomed mudball, Luke (Owen Myre) and Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna), a brother and his bully of a sister, have found the crystal that controls the beast and have renamed him Psycho Goreman. Played by Matthew Ninaber with the voice of Steven Vlahos, he’s a perfect mash-up of Oderus Urungus and Pinhead, yet completely and utterly original.
Despite assuring the kids numerous times that he will kill them, Luke and Mimi take a break from playing their invented ball game to walk their monster around the neighborhood, watching as he decimates the police, murders some thugs and transforms their friend Alastair (Scout Flint) into a gigantic walking brain.
However, it doesn’t take long for the past to come calling, as PG uses his blood to call for his old troops — the Paladins Obsidian — to come take him away from all of this. They are Queen Obelisk, the royal matriarch to the Cemetarium Collective, a twisted sect of interstellar necromancer berserkers (yeah, this movie is exactly that awesome); Witchmaster, a sinister sorcerer from the distant Tokusatsu* system ; Cassius 3000, the golden swordsman that not even PG trusts (Conor Sweeney, who wrote The Editor); Death Trapper, a living cauldron filled with the bodies of those it has already murdered and Darkraiser — who much like Starscream once did to Megatron — has taken the command position when PG was sent down to Earth,
Through all this, the kid’s parents, played by Timothy Paul McCarthy and Alexis Kara Hancey — try to stay lazy or keep it all together respectively.
Imagine a world where instead of E.T., Gertie and Elliot ended up getting the Darkness from Legend. That will give you some small idea of what this movie is all about and yet it has one major conceit: perhaps Mimi is a bigger monster than every practical effect monster in this gore-drenched epic.
The Astron-6 crew has made some pretty great films. This is the highest achievement I’ve seen from any of them, presenting a fully built world full of creatures that I want to see in a million sequels. I’m fully ready to buy tons of action figures and t-shirts of every single monster in this movie and you will be too.
For a creature whose entire existence is built on death and destruction, Psycho Goreman has a heart. Sure, he learns how to harness the power of love to probably kill every single being on our planet, but he also learns how to play drums and the love of a little girl — not like that’ll save any of us.
It’s nice to have your high expectations exceeded. I’m more than an advocate for this movie. I’m an apostle.
You can learn more on the official Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages. This comes out on demand on January 21. Be ready for it.
*Of course, this is the Japanese word for special filming, which is often used to describe movies like Godzilla.
Ron Underwood has had a pretty good directing career, with this as his first film, although he was an AD on Tourist Trap. His career is all over the place genre-wise, with City Slickers, Hearts and Souls and Mighty Joe Young doing well before The Adventures of Pluto Nash failed. He’s since done well in TV, directing episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Boston Legal and Fear the Walking Dead. And, like nearly every horror director from the 80’s, he’s put out several holiday movies such as Santa Baby, The Year Without a Santa Claus and Holiday In Handcuffs.
Valentine “Val” McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) are sick of life in Perfection, Nevada. They decide to leave town for Bixby, the closest big city, but are stopped when they find the body of Edgar Deems up in a tower, dead from dehydration. Before you know it, they’re under assault by gigantic worms called Graboids and working with seismology student Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter, How I Got Into College) and survivalists Burt and Heather (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire) to figure out how to survive.
There’s a great supporting cast on hand, like John Carpenter stock actor Victor Wong as a general store owner, Bobby Jacoby, Ariana Richards (who battled even bigger creatures in two Jurassic Park movies and the third sequel to this series, too), Charlotte Stewart (Mary X in Eraserhead and Bettie Briggs on Twin Peaks) and Bibi Besch (The Pack, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
This movie did just OK in theaters before becoming a rental and cable success. It was such a big deal that it has since become an entire series of films, including 1996’s Tremors 2: Aftershocks (Fred Ward came back, as does Michael Gross), 2001’s Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (Gross stays on and Ariana Richards comes back) and the 2004 prequel Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, which is set in 1889 and has Gross playing the role of Hiram Gummer, Burt’s great grandfather. These films were all made by the original creative team of Underwood, Brent Maddock and S. S. Wilson.
Eleven years later, Universal made Tremors 5: Bloodlines with an all-new cast and crew, save Gross. That movie was followed by Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, which brought back Jamie Kennedy as Burt’s son Travis and Gross and last year’s Tremors: Shrieker Island, which closes out Burt’s battles against the Graboids, Dirt Dragons, Ass-Dragons and Shriekers. There was also a TV series as well that aired on SyFy and a pilot for a new series was made in 2017 but wasn’t bought.
Before making this movie, Kevin Bacon really thought his career was over. He screamed to his pregnant wife Kyra Sedgwick, “I can’t believe I’m doing a movie about underground worms!'” But by the end of the movie, he’d admit that making Tremors was the most fun he’d had in his entire career. As for Gross, he basically walked off the set of the last episode of Family Ties and on to the desert location for this movie.
Now you can see the best version of this movie ever thanks to Arrow Video. There’s a new 4K restoration from the original negative, approved by director Ron Underwood and director of photography Alexander Gruszynski, on blu ray and UHD. There’s also new audio commentary with Underwood, Maddock and Wilson as well as a second version with notes from Jonathan Melville, author of Seeking Perfection: The Unofficial Guide to Tremors.
There’s also a new documentary about the history of the film series, several interviews with key cast and crew members, a feature on the overdubs to remove profanity for the TV version and an entire disc full of extended interviews, outtakes and three early shorts from the film’s makers. Plus, you get a 60-page perfect-bound book, several posters and a set of postcards.
If you love this series — and seeing how they made so many of them it stands to reason that many of us do — this is absoutely the most perfect version you’re going to get of this, unless you go out and find a Graboid for yourself.
Known as Fear Chamber — as well as Chamber of Fear, The Torture Chamber and Torture Zone — this is another of the four movies that Boris Karloff made for Juan Ibáñez, with Jack Hill directing his segments.
In this strange little film, scientists discover a living rock beneath a volcano that feeds off the fear of young women. So instead of leaving well enough alone and saying, “This seems like a bad idea,” they create a fear chamber — yes, it’s right there in the title — to create the energy the rock needs from girls frightened out of their minds.
Karloff is obviously in bad health, even appearing lying in bed in some scenes. No matter — his role as Dr. Mantell is a bonkers one, as he even puts his own daughter into danger, facing off with the rock god who has obsessed him. I mean, of course he’d create a haunted house filled with strange people and vaguely Satanic ceremonies in order to keep studying his rock formation find, right?
Julissa, who plays Karloff’s daughter, also appears in two more of Hill/Ibáñez films, House of Evil and Isle of the Snake People, which is somehow even weirder than this one. This also has Isela Vega in it, who was in El Macho Bionico and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, plus Yerye Beirute from The Body Snatcher and Santanón, a small size actor who is in plenty of memorable big roles in films like Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters and El Gato con Botas.
I’ve read so many people saying that Targets should have been Karloff’s last film. They might not understand that he was a working actor and the fact that he was able to keep working and in demand for roles right up until the end is the real testiment to his career.
This movie stars Gaspar Henaine, better known as Capulina, who often partnered with Marco Antonio Campos as the double act Viruta and Capulina. His nickname, El Rey del Humorismo Blanco (The King of White Humor) is because he’s known for clean and innocent humor.
Shockingly, I kinda dug this ridiculous movie that looks like it was shot with an eye to the TV Batman, packed with sound effects and no small amount of silliness.
Count Dracula lives with several female vampires, which seems like a pretty good deal for him, but then a spear accidentally drops on him and he dies. For one hundred and fifty years, strong men are brought int o save him, but they all fail and are killed. Capulina comes in as a handyman and book, he bumps into the spear and Dracula is back among the living.
Rossy Mendoza shows up in this as Pampa, who is the Count’s main wife. She was known as Mexico’s Smallest Waist and The Body. She’s in the same category as Lyn May, Princess Lea and Angelica Chain, as they are all burlesque performers who became famous for their appearances in Mexican exploitation movies. You may recognize her from Santo vs. the Kidnappers, Night of San Juan: Santo in Black Gold and La Laamada del Sexo, which from the description reads like a giallo, a fact made positive by the knowledge that George Hilton is in it.
This movie somehow is family friendly and filled with the most fetching vampire women this side of Hammer. Mexico, you’ve done it again.
The difference is in the casting. Wilbur Grey (Lou Costello) is now the taller and funnier of the two, Paco (Manuel “Loco” Valdés). The straight man is no longer Chick Young (Bud Abbott), but now the shorter Agapito (José Jasso). That said, both of these comedy teams work at a package station where crates arrive. Except in Mexico, those crates say The Vampire and The Frankenstein Monster. Not to be a total geek, but this is a major pet peeve, as it’s always Frankenstein’s Monster.
Nonetheless, both of these creatures are real and in both movies, an attractive evil female doctor takes them away. In America, we had Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenora Aubert). In Mexico, it’s Dr. Sofia (Nora Veryán).
There’s also a werewolf in both movies, as well as a plan for one of our heroes to have their brain get inserted into the skull of Frankenstein’s Monster and for the Vampire to take over the world — or at least the United States.
There may have been an English dubbed version of this at one point, but it’s been lost. Regardless of the film’s cheap budget and less than Universal level monsters, it’s still worth a look. The most interesting thing to me is that Dracula is super skinny, just like John Carradine usually was in Mexican vampire films, which has me wondering in the early morning hours whether or not that was a cultural thing South of the Border. I’d like to think that skinny Draculas are totally a Mexican cultural staple. Viva Draculas flacos!
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