Originally a short called Meltdown, this film follows Hunter, a man who proposes to his girlfriend who turns him down, at which point his friends reveal to him just how horrible of a person she was. And then, as things happen, zombies attack. Then there’s a jump into the future and Hunter has become a much more capable man of action.

Set in Somerset, PA, this film follows in the tradition of zombie movies coming from Pittsburgh, Writer/producer/director and star Jacob O’Brien Mulliken was also in the movie Monongahela, which is about the hunt for a creature in the Mon river, which is about a half mile from our house.

I thought the effects for this were pretty solid, even if some of the IMDB comments savaged the entire film. Then again, most of those seem like they’re coming from Pittsburgh-based talent who are either upset that they were in the original short and not the remake or those that got screwed over in the process of making this movie. Actually, if you filmed that commentary page, you may have a better movie than this.

That said, you can watch this movie on Tubi or grab it from Wild Eye Releasing.

If an astronaut crash lands and says things like, “My hand… makes me do things…. kill…. kill!” At this point, you may say, perhaps this is not lack of oxygen in the astronaut’s helmet but he may really have something wrong with him.

There’s also a medical student named Paul (Rod Lauren was a singer who released the song “If I Had a Girl” before acting; he moved to the Philippines where he married actress Nida Blanca. He became the lead suspect in her death when she was stabbed in a parking garage, then fought extradition back to the country for years before jumping off a hotel room balcony; sorry to bring everyone down with who Paul really was) who finds the astronaut’s hand and well, keeps it. Because that’s what doctors do: keep desiccated hands that they find from space crashes.

Paul starts to use the power of the hand to attack people he dislikes and becomes obsessed with it. The police — led by The Skipper Alan Hale Jr. — try to catch him and the space agency starts to realize that the fingerprints of the dead astronaut are all over the place. So Paul takes the hand to the beach and tries to destroy it and some cats try to eat it, because that’s the kind of movie The Crawling Hand is.

Somehow, writer Rick Moody used this film as inspiration for his novel Four Fingers of Death, the tale of writer Montese Crandall, who attempts to get over the death of his wife by throwing himself into his work and writing a remake of The Crawling Hand.

Director Herbert L. Strock also made Gog and The Devil’s Messenger and one of the co-writers was Joe Cranston, the father of Bryan. None of them noticed that at times, the crawling hand is a left hand a right hand at other times.

Il Marsigliese “The Black Angel” has been killing people left and right in Turin. One cop, Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi, The French Connection, Contraband) has had enough. Instead of going by the book, the death of his wife leads Vanni to give out unlicensed .38 Colt Diamondback revolvers to a select group of officers that he trusts, making them the Colt 38 Special Squad.

What makes it even better is that “The Black Angel” is one of the best Italian movie villains of all time, the dashing and yet oh so reprehensible Ivan Rassimov. Vanni killed his brother, so he hunted down Vanni’s wife and killed her in front of their son. Making this villain even more insidious is the fact that his gang goes beyond simple murder to becoming near supervillains, planting bombs all over the city.

This is a movie filled with stunts that look beyond dangerous, probably because they were filmed with no permits and one shot at glory. Vanni and “The Black Angel” are two sides of the same rage-filled soul and only one of them will escape this film alive. Vanni’s gun jammed the last time they met and he blames himself for everything that follows; that .38 Colt Diamondback is the only thing left he can rely on.

Perhaps most importantly, your eyes are not deceiving you. That’s Grace Jones singing in the nightclub scenes. Her being in this movie is alone worth the price of owning it.

Sadly, this would be the last film of Massimo Dallamano, who was the cinematographer on Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More before making one of the best giallo ever, What Have You Done to Solange? (and the cinematographer on that was Aristide Massaccesi, of course), as well as A Black Veil for Lisa, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and The Night Child. He died in a car accident soon after this movie finished production.

Savage Three is one of five movies on Arrow Video’s Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers 1973-1977. These films are great examples of the Italian poliziotteschi genre and the set includes high def versions of this movie, Savage Three, Highway Racer, Like Rabid Dogs and No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. This version of this film is a brand new 2K restoration exclusive to this release and it comes with an interview and introduction by composer Stelvio Cipriani and an interview with editor Antonio Siciliano. You can get it from MVD.

This Spanish film has no ravens — its title translates as The Swamp of the Ravens — but instead black vultures. It’s about Dr. Frosta, who believes that life can continue after death and will do anything to take that hypothesis and transform it into a theory. There’s also a guy singing to mannequins and the doctor trying to use blood to keep his girlfriend alive but he continues to take her to 6th base, as they say.

Thanks to Mandrakegrey on Letterboxd, I can share those lyrics:

“Never, never will you fly from me
Lifeless heart that doesn’t beat after all
I have such feelings for a dead robot

Wherever you may find yourself
I wish you were dead
My own robot, my own, my lady”

It seems like every time the scientist kills people and brings them back from the dead and gets rid of the results, they come back from the dead again. There’s some strange imagery here and the story never really adds up, but you know, I was kind of really entertained by all of this. So I guess it’s a zombie film, but it could also be an attempt at art.

Director Manuel Caño also made Voodoo Black Exorcist, which sounds just as odd as this movie, so I have to track that one down now as well. Writer Santiago Moncada was the pen behind such oddball efforts as The Corruption of Chris Miller, Cutthroats 9, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, The Fourth Victim, All the Colors of the Dark, Ricco, A Bell from Hell, Curse of the Black Cat, Rest In Pieces and many more. Knowing that made me realize why I felt like I liked this movie more than the other reviewers I’ve seen online have.

F.E.A.R. means Forget Everything and Run. I’m sure some lazier critics will use that in their headline for their review, but let’s see what this is really all about.

Directed by Geoff Reisner and Jason Tobias (who also wrote the film and appears as Ethan), this is the story of a young family whose supplies have been stolen by some bandits. However, when a deadly pathogen is released into the atmosphere, they must all work together to survive.

A pandemic has resulted in most of the Pacific Northwest being walled off by the government. That’s where the Allister family is trapped, including their young daughter, who is kept alive through an improvised medical device. There are also zombies that have been created by the disease that are roaming the first and last five minutes of this movie.

This feels a lot like A Quiet Place, which is not a bad movie to be inspired by, in that this is a human drama with some horror and science fiction elements surrounding it. The cast is talented and gives some strong performances. If only the script worked as hard as they did to be a little more unique. Yet all in all, not all that bad of a time was had by all (except those, you know, menaced by the zombies and winter weather).

FEAR is available on demand and on DVD from New Era Entertainment.

Take a look at this little guy in this movie. He’s awesome. He looks nothing like the poster art at all and for that, I respect the hell out of this movie.

It’s also about a religious family that kills sinners and then uses the meat from those infidels to survive through the harsh winters. So, you know, cannibals and swamp monsters, or as the title promises, Creature from Cannibal Creek.

Writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, costumer, sound designer, even one of the guys who is wearing the suit — John Migliore did pretty much everything in this movie that takes everything you loved about The Hills Have Eyes, moved it to a more watery setting and then brought in Swamp Thing.

How much influence does Wes Craven’s movie have on this? One of the bad guys is named Neptune!

If you love swamp horror and cannibals…do I even have to finish that sentence? I had a blast watching this one. I can fully admit that it’s a goofball cheap movie, but you know, the lifeblood of this site remains within films exactly like this.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the DVD from Wild Eye Releasing.

Distributed by American International Pictures, The Screaming Skull was part of double features with Earth vs. the Spider or Terror from the Year 5000. It was the first movie that Alex Nicol directed, as he was tired of the roles he was being offered. He also made Three Came Back and Point of Terror.

In case you were worried about the contents of this movie, it starts with an open coffin and a narrator explaining that the end of this movie is so terrifying that it may kill you, while reassuring you that should you die of fright, your burial will be paid for by the film’s producers. I would assume that this contract is now null and void, so you should watch this movie with caution*.

Jenni and Eric are newly married, but this isn’t Eric’s first time at the altar. His first wife died when she slipped and hit her head on the edge of a decorative pond. If that doesn’t seem weird enough, Jenni has just gotten out of an asylum after the death of her parents. Her very rich parents.

Mickey (Nicol) the gardener was childhood friends with Eric’s first wife, whose ghost may haunt the home. Also, perhaps even more strange is the fact that she looks just like Jenni’s mother. Jenni demands that the portrait of the dead woman be burned and when that happens, it leaves behind a skull.

This would be a good time to leave if you were her, because that ghost — and the fact that her husband is gaslighting her — are both absolutely real.

The cast members for this movie were each paid $1000 as well as the promise that a share of the profits would be shared. As you can imagine, no one was paid any more than that first grand.

*When William Castle did the same publicity stunt for Macabre, he actually paid for this insurance. Nicol did not.

In two days in September 1975, three men — architecture student Gianni Guido, medical student Angelo Izzo and Andrea Ghira, the son of the building contractor and former Olympic water polo champion Aldo Ghira — invited Donatella Colasanti and Rosaria Lopez to a party at Ghirain’s family home. The trio had been in trouble before, as Ghira and Izzo had served twenty months for an armed robbery charge and Izzo and two other friends had assaulted two women, a crime he never served time for. He also proclaimed that he admired the Clan of Marseillais, which used drug trafficking and kidnappings, making crime into an actual industry.

The three men and two women spent some time together and there was no incident or warning of what would happen next until Guido and Izzo made sexual advances. When turned down, they pulled guns and claimed they were kidnapping the women for the boss of the Clan, Jacques Berenguer.

For the next day and a night, the two girls were taken on a tour of hell that only ended when Lopez was drowned in a bathtub and Colasanti was strangled with a belt and hit with an iron bar. Pretending to be dead, she laid in the trunk of Guido’s father’s FIAT 127 while the trio drove to Rome to dispose of the bodies, laughing and listening to music.

Instead, the three men decided to have dinner, during which they got in a brawl with some young communists. That meant that they left the car unattended, during which Colasanti began screaming and striking the walls of the trunk. A security guard actually thought it was the sound of a cat trapped inside the car.

The media was there as she was removed from the car. Colasanti never truly recovered from the mental trauma of the evening. Izzo and Guido were arrested several hours later while Ghira was tipped off and ran, even sending a letter to his friends where he told them they’d soon be released, as well as threatening to kill Colasanti if she testified.

Izzo and Guido had hung a large stadium-sized banner that said “Corso Trieste 1972 – La Vecchia Guardia” in their cell. They also tried to escape in 1977, but by 1980, Guido had his sentence reduced by declaring that he was sorry, which was accepted by Lopez’s family. That really wasn’t true, as he escaped in 1981 and fled to Buenos Aires before he was caught. He escaped again in 1985 and spent nearly a decade before he was caught in Panama, where he was working as a car dealer.  He was finally released from prison in 2008. When Izzo was released from jail in 2004, he was already back to assault and murder within a year. He remains imprisoned.

As for Ghira, he fled to Spain and adopted the name of Massimo Testa de Andres and enlisted in the Spanish foreign legion. He was expelled for drug abuse in 1994 and supposedly died of a drug overdose that year, a fact that was only learned in 2005 when a body was exhumed and identified with DNA. However, many did not believe that report, as Ghira had been seen in Rome, Brazil, Kenya and South Africa in the years since he was supposedly dead.

Written and directed by Mario Imperoli, Come Cani Arrabbiati tells the story of rich kid Tony Ardenghi. His double life consists of being a student by day and by night, acting as the killer of prostitutes. Along with his friends Rico and Sylvia, they go from simple violence at soccer matches — a theme of these youth gone wild films — to drowning women in bathtubs in an echo of the real-life murder discussed above.

Inspector Paolo Muzi then gets an idea, assigning his lover Germana (Paola Senatore, Eaten Alive!, Emanuelle in America) undercover, but he soon learns that the rich kids station in life prevents him from getting the justice that only a group of socialist protestors can.

Sadly, Imperoli — who was mainly known for sex comedies like Blue Jeans and Monika — died a year after this movie at the way too young age of 46. I would have loved to have seen where else his career would have gone.

This is a brutal and dark movie made about brutal and dark times. And it’s one I recommend that you see.

Savage Three is one of five movies on Arrow Video’s Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers 1973-1977. These films are great examples of the Italian poliziotteschi genre and the set includes high def versions of this movie, Savage Three, Highway Racer, Colt 38 Special Squad and No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. This disc has interviews with cinematographer Romano Albani, historian Fabio Melelli on Like Rabid Dogs and assistant director Claudio Bernabei. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How about I already watched this back on January 7 of last year? Oh well — this time I went deeper into the original vesion of this movie.

In Sweden, this name’s title translates as Space Invasion of Lapland. Internationally, it was Terror In the Midnight Sun. And in America, after it was purchased by Associated Distributors Productions Inc. — Jerry Warren’s company — it became Invasion of the Animal People.

Warren is legendary to me because sure, he took movies from other countries and sliced and diced them, but many of the foreign movies that he brought to America would have been seen here otherwise.

Mexican (Bullet for Billy the Kid, La Momia Azteca — which became Attack of the Mayan Mummy and Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which also has scenes from La Casa del Terror), La Marca del Muerto which was Warren’s Creature of the Walking Dead), Brazilian (The Violent and the Damned) Swedish, (No Time to Kill, X) and Chilean films (La Casa está Vacía and La Dama de la Muerte edited to make Curse of the Stone Hand) all went through the Warren blender, during which he would cut out the original dialogue, shoot new scenes in which the American actors would give the exposition and also feature scenes of people talking to one another. Somehow, he got to keep making these movies and made some money. Warren even released two singles at this time with his band The Pets, “Streets of Love” and “Monkey Walk.”

Sadly, after The Wild World of Batwoman, Warren would stop making movies for 15 years, coming back to just make one more, Frankenstein Island.

Sure, Warren did movies on his own, but we’re here to discuss his cut and paste career, which starts here. The funny thing is that the original film was shot in English and by all accounts made narrative sense. The remix, however, does not.

There’s an entire framing device that adds twenty minutes to the movie before we get to the UAP that’s flying over Sweden and also John Carradine as your narrator. That’s because according to Swedish producer Bertil Jernberg, his co-producer Gustaf Unger had told him that Paramount was buying their film, then sold it. to Warren and kept all the money.

So yeah — Warren cut the movie down by 18-minutes and still was able to add footage, which I call being really great at math. Now, Diane Wilson has been involved with alien craft before and there are also some ham radio operators who show up, take time away from the main tale and never show up again. Some of the cut footage did, however, come back when this movie was sold to syndication and that footage is a Jerry Warren trademark — people sit around and discuss the action we’ve seen already.

You can download the original version of this movie on the Internet Archive.