Molly “Angel” Stewart is still a photographer, but now she does it for the police. And she’s portrayed by the fourth actress in as many movies to play her, Darlene Vogel.

One of her old street girlfriends is in town, touring with a band and of course, ends up dead before we’re all that long into this movie. After photographing the body — it’s her job — Molly goes back to being Angel and goes undercover as a groupie.

A sequel in name only, this was directed by Richard Schenkman. Strangely enough, the Miramax site lists George Axsmith as the director, another name* that Schenkman would use.

Stoney Jackson, who was Phones in Roller Boogie, is in this, as are Samantha Phillips (Phantasm II) and Roddy McDowall, who deserves so much better more than anyone has ever deserved so much better.

That said, this ends up being a movie about a troubled musician more than Angel, but such is life when you’re watching the fourth movie in a sequel series that is basically unconnected. Maybe a producer somewhere wants to know about my idea, Angel vs. Vice Academy.

*On his website, the director says, “For decades I said that The Pompatus of Love was my first movie, but close friends have long known that two years before Pompatus, I directed Angel IV: Undercover aka Assault with a Deadly Weapon. Why the obfuscation? Simply, I didn’t want my official “first film” to be a dreadful, low-budget B-movie I didn’t write, although I was very grateful for the chance to learn-by-doing and make my mistakes on a project less close to my heart. But in all fairness, even this was supposed to be a better movie – a “rock n’ roll murder mystery” – and it was, until the producer demanded that we shoot an “alternate version” of several scenes, enabling him to position the film as an Angel sequel in “a couple of Eastern European markets.” Naturally, only the Angel version ever saw the light of day. Still… I got to work with a good number of dear friends, plus the iconic Hollywood legend Roddy McDowall, as well as the brilliant, much-missed Kevin Gilbert, who did the songs and score.”

Suckered yet again into a Troma film, this time one about seven Catholic school girls who go off to renovate an old house that has a mysterious and dark history. There’s also an art collection, the ghost of a girl killed in the house, nuns, no gore and no nudity, either.

It’s like someone filmed a slasher and forgot to, you know, actually make a slasher.

John P. Finnegan also wrote Blades, a golf-themed slasher that I know I’ll have to sit through one of these days.

After a great opening, where a bride ghost shows a melting face to some spooky synth, I was expecting more. But then there’s no actual death until fifty minutes more.So there you go. If you’re a slasher completist, and yes, I am certainly one, you can mark this to avoid.

You can watch this on YouTube.

After visiting her father’s grave, Lilly (Valerie Jane Parker, the 2021 version of Wrong Turn) and her mother get into a car accident that leaves her blind and an orphan. As she struggles with the loss of her sight, she starts to hear voices and just thinks that it’s some form of synesthesia. The truth is that these voices are souls stuck in limbo looking for a way back into our world. And that way? Years later, it becomes Lily’s unborn child.

Voices is the first full-length film by director Nathaniel Nuon, working with writer Daniel Hathcock (they also have a film called Paralyzed in production). They also have some known faces in this film, like Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism), Jordan Ladd (Cabin Fever) and Leslie Easterbrook (Sgt. Callahan from the Police Academy series).

Somewhere in this film is a great idea and a good film, but it struggles to emerge. The central conceit of a blind girl rising past a rough childhood and the voices that helped her deal with the loss of her sight becoming either demonic or cold cases left behind is a fantastic storytelling engine that a lot can be done with. Instead, this movie is never sure what movie it wants to be. Is it a drama with bits of the supernatural? Is it a false memory story? An exploration of growing up with a handicap? Or is it all of these things at the same time and unsure of itself?

I wanted to like this movie more than I did, so I’ll keep an eye out for Paralyzed and hope that the filmmakers will use this film — which trust me, has some worthwhile moments — as a learning experience. Judicious editing of twenty minutes or so would have gone a long way, too.

The Voices is now available online. You can learn more at the official site.

This movie has an all-star cast and by that I mean an all-star cast for me. Michael Moriarty? Gerrit Graham? Laurene Landon? Karen Black?

Stephen Jarvis (Moriarty) and Ellen Jarvis (Black) had a mutant child that she wants to forget and society wants to exile on an island, where the drug company who caused all this sends soldiers to kill the children. Of course, the kids kill and eat everyone, because these babies are nature’s most amazing predators.

Somehow, another journey to the island ends exactly the same way, with Jarvis surviving because one of the mutants is his son and also because they have a supply of human bodies to eat and need him alive. He ends up in Cuba, where he’s treated way better than he is in the United States, and when he gets back to Florida, the children have sought out Ellen to raise one of their children.

Also, a giant baby wipes out cop after cop after cop.

Larry Cohen’s third movie in the series, this came about after Warner Brothers wanted him to remake House of Wax. Instead, he made this film and A Return to Salem’s Lot.

If the beginning of this movie seems familiar, it was also used in the Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool. But hey, Larry Cohen was all about recycling. He used footage from The Old Man and the Sea for the sharks and ocean shots from The Sea Chase.

You know, people have made fun of this movie when they tell me about it and they were wrong. Sure, the effects are somewhat dated, but so what? You have Michael Moriarty being as insane as he always is, going off in every single scene, and mutant children with mental powers eating human beings. That’s the kind of movie that I choose to watch over almost anything else.

Erwin C. Dietrich has some amazingly titled movies on his IMDB director list, including She Devils of the SS, Stewardesses Report, Caged Women and the absolute ripoff title The Devil in Miss Jonas. He’s one of three directors for this movie, who also include Peter Baumgartner (he shot most of Dietrich’s films and also was the cinematographer on Code Name: Wild Geese) and Jack Hill*. That’s right — the Jack Hill, director of Spider Baby and Switchblade Sisters.

Vicki (Ingrid Steeger, who would go on to be in all manner of European exploitation movies) hooks up with the rock star of her dreams, who leaves her after a night of aardvarking and rug use. She decides to grab her girlfriend and look for him across Europe, dealing with devil worshippers and bikers** along the way.

This starts off as a really lighthearted romp and gets dark, real dark, sixties dark by the end of it all. Man, I thought this was going to be a bit of the slap and a tickle and it ended up smacking me right across the face.

*Roger Corman was originally going to produce this and have Hill direct, but he pulled out and Hill’s involvement was limited. However, this was still sold in Europe as a Roger Corman film and there had to be legal proceedings to change that.

*Dietrich messed up when dealing with the Hells Angels. One of their girls was nude in this and she wasn’t happy with how she looked. They told the director to cut her scene out, he refused and ended up having to pay them off to stop threatening theaters that showed this.

American-International Pictures ran this on a double bill with Shake, Rattle and Rock, supposedly basing the story on something that happened to writer Lou Rusoff when he worked as a social worker.

Audrey Barton (Marla English, Flesh and the Spur) has rich parents who are wilder than she is, hooking up with neighbors when she’s trying to come home from a date with Tommy (Frank Gorshin as a high school student!). Everyone in her life is wild. Her friend Mary (Mary Ellen Kay, Voodoo Woman) is dating a twenty-year-old. Angie’s (Gloria Castillo, Reform School Girl) mom is on her third husband. And the kids in school are taunting her over all of it.

I mean, if I were Audrey, I’d flip out too. The parents spike the punch at her party with gin. The parents!

Director Edward L. Cahn put out some crazy stuff in the 50’s. There’s this movie, sure, but also Creature with the Atom Brain, Zombies of Mora Tau, Drag Strip Girl, The Terror from Beyond Space, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake and more.

Joe Dante remade this in 1994 as part of Showtime’s Rebel Highway series, reuniting most of the cast of The Howling — Christopher Stone, Dee Wallace, Robert Picardo, Dick Miller and Belinda Balaski — and starring Julie Bowen, Paul Rudd and Jenny Lewis.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tom DiSimone was back to make another Angel film, but for the third one in a row, we have a brand new Molly “Angel” Stewart. Mitzi Kapture, who was Sgt. Rita Lee Lance on Silk Stalkings takes over the lead and instead of being a lawyer, Angel is now a photographer.

While taking photos, she ends up taking a photo of her mother, the woman that left her fourteen years ago and sent her off to that world of the streets. The same thing is happening with her sister, so she heads out to Los Angeles just in time for her mom to explode. Now, Molly must become Angel again to rescue Michele (Tawny Ellis, Rockula).

Maud Adams, who played two different Bond girls (Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun and Octopussy, as well as a cameo in A View to a Kill) plays the madam who is keeping Angel’s sister in her white slavery porn empire.

After the first two Angel films, this is seriously a let-down. It’s not bad, but the whole idea of Angel’s street family was what made those films work for me. Sure, Dick Miller, Toni Basil, Ashlyn Gere and Julie Smith are in this, which I appreciate, but I’m left missing Susan Tyrrell.

Matthew Bright started his career by writing Forbidden Zone as well as playing Squeezit and René Henderson in that transmission from another dimension. With Freeway, he’s simultaneously making a Hollywood movie and the kind of exploitation film that was often outside the mainstream.

Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon, who was the hottest actress of the time after this, so this is kind of strange seeing an A-lister, much less two, get down into the scuzzy dirt as if they were making an AIP movie or worse) has a horrible life. Her mother — Amanda Plummer is, as always, dependably deranged — has just gone away for hooking and her stepfather — Michael T. Weiss from The Pretender — has been assaulting her for years. She steals her social worker’s car and heads off into the woods — or the road from Los Angeles to Stockton — to live with her grandmother, only stopping long enough to get a gun from her man Chopper and to narrowly miss him get killed in a drive-by. And oh yeah, her real dad was Richard Speck.

Things seemingly get better when she’s picked up by Bob Wolverton (Keifer Sutherland), a counselor for boys who she feels able to share all the secrets of her horrible past. Then he tells her a secret too: he’s the I-5 Killer and she’s going to be his next victim.

She turns the tables and repeatedly shoots him, but the media and society turn the tables on her, casting him as a hero and landing her in jail. That’s when she joins with Rhonda (Brittany Murphy) and Mesquite (Rhonda Alanna Ubach) to escape prison and head back to grandmother’s house, where this movie’s big bad wolf is waiting for her, facial paralysis and all.

Maybe I was in the right mood for this, but it hit everything just perfectly. It helps to have Dan Hedaya in the cast, because he’s the kind of actor that elevates everything. And casting Brooke Shields as Sutherland’s rich wife really pays off.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Every review keeps bringing up the same issue with this film: the human interaction scenes are boring.

Guess what? We watched about eighty kaiju movies in the last few weeks and can honestly tell you that every single one of those movies can claim just about the same thing, so the venerable Toho got smart and added aliens and ape humans from the future to those scenes, as well as miniature singing women who worship Mothra so that even the non-giant monster moments of their films are real strange.

To those of you not able to name the four different eras of Godzilla films — Showa, Heisei, Millennium and Reiwa — let me tell you, the human moments in this are in no way as bad as All Monsters Attack.

That said, you can literally remove Godzilla and every single human from this movie and you still pretty much could have the same story. This isn’t Godzilla vs. Kong as much as it’s another movie that we could call Kong: Inside the Hollow Earth. Actually, those moments, where Kong and a crew of good and bad scientists goes inside a gravity well to wind up in a Skartaris or Shangri-La or Savage Land inside our planet are some of the best parts of the movie, topped only by Godzilla somehow being able to blast nuclear fire from Hong Kong to the middle of Earth’s core without destroying the entire planet.

So, if we remove those moments of humanity, we really should also just forget the lame conspiracy theory plot with Milly Bobby Brown, Brian Tyree Henry and Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople that exists merely to give us exposition, show off some conspiracy theory under the world trains and explain who the big bad really is.

Yes, unlike every human bad guy who has ever gone up against a giant monster, it turns out that owning a big company like Apex Cybernetics and using scientific expeditions to make money never really pays off.

Director Adam Wingard made You’re Next and The Guest. If I hadn’t looked up that he directed this, I would have never known. It’s a writer’s room-made film, with the last creative team making rewrites so that everyone is in character. And it’s another part of the shared universe post-Marvel Cinematic Universe aesthetic, where every movie leads to the next, unlike the Toho films where fans were the ones to create a patchwork No-Prize narrative that barely connects them.

That said, you can just enjoy the huge set pieces here, like Kong and Godzilla battling on the deck of an aircraft carrier and the final battle in Hong Kong. It looks like paintings come to life, the kind of battle between giant monsters that I could only dream of as a child satisfied with foam suits and zipped-in actors.

Ishirô Honda, who directed the original King Kong vs. Godzilla and made a movie that satirized Japanese TV along the way, once said “The reason I showed the monster battle through the prism of a ratings war was to depict the reality of the times. When you think of King Kong just plain fighting Godzilla, it is stupid. But how you stage it, the times in which it takes place, that is the thought process of the filmmaker.”

So is this film dumb? Well, it was sold at some Carl’s Jr. restaurants with Godzilla hamburgers and Kong chicken sandwiches, the exact kind of commercialism that the Toho movie made fun of with Kong yaki noodles. But it is a big tentpole Hollywood movie in the weird second year of there not being a lot of places ready to show it.

But hey, it does have monsters named Titanus Warbats and Kong gets a radioactive axe, so I can’t be all huffy and say that I didn’t enjoy it. I still have an entire shelf full of much better kaiju films — ask me, I’ll recommend like twenty to you — to enjoy whenever I want, but today’s children need a movie like this to get them excited the same way I was back in 1976, going crazy for Kong in theaters and Godzilla on UHF monster host shows.