I expected this movie to be a quick and cheap stripper movie and ended up watching a movie that was well directed and filmed that built some genuine tension throughout. Writer/director Jason Rosenblatt has been making shorts since this movie, but I’m really interested in his next full-length attempt.

Check it out for yourself and see a film that tells the story of the control of dancers on stage and the control that men try to exert upon them.

You can watch this on Tubi or order it from Wild Eye Releasing.

Just in case you were confused, this is not the Japanese movie Jisatsu Sākuru (AKA Suicide Club and Suicide Circle), but the story of Liz, a young woman who has been trapped in her apartment, when she finds a web community called the Suicide Club that really should have been called the Kill People Club.

Once a user joins, they’re asked to pick someone they want to be killed or they themselves get killed for not nominating someone. The club then sends masked killers to do the actual wetwork and then records it and sends everyone the video.

The first part of this movie is really decent, setting up a Rear Window voyeur vibe. Sure, the film doesn’t really deliver on that promise, but it’s not a bad movie.

Klariza Clayton, who plays Liz, is really great though. She imbues the character with a spark that feels real. And writer/director Maximilian von Vier really sets up the mood that works so well in the first act. I’m interested in his next two projects, The Kaiserfeld Rule, in which a woman in a concentration camp plays chess with real lives on the line, and Magick.

You can get Suicide Club from Wild Eye Releasing.

Inspired by the movie Man Bites Dog, director Yavor Petkov was also able to look to the corruption in his native Bulgaria when he made Danny. Legend. God., saying “Of course, the vast catalogue of outrageous examples of corruption in Bulgaria and beyond helped greatly with the script. It provided markers for me to know what would be too far fetched. For example, if it happened in real life, then I knew I should tone it down from 11 to 3 or 4, so it looks just about plausible on screen.”

The titular Danny has agreed to be the subject of a documentary on money laundering, a subject that Petkov also knows well, working in the field of money laundering prevention for a decade. However, he soon tells the crew to forget their script and to just follow him. 

Soon, Danny (Dimo Alexiev, who this pictures depends upon; luckily he’s an incredibly strong actor) has chased away the reporter who has come for his story, leaving the cameraman and the boom operator to follow him through an increasingly more upsetting day in his life.

Who is Danny? A gangster? A politician? A club owner? A dancer? All of these things? Who shaves their chest with a straight razor and has a bust of themselves on display in their home? What kind of person openly sniffs coke, aardvarks prostitutes and urinates all over the place when they know the camera is running?

This is a film where you’re either going to go for the ride and love or love to hate its subject or the entire enterprise will just turn you off. Here’s to the filmmakers for creating something so in your face.

You can learn more on the official Facebook page. Danny. Legend. God. will be released on demand in the U.S. on July 20.

Released in Italy as Fango Bollente (Boiling Mud), Savage Three is a brutal example of the Italian crime and murder genre known as poliziotteschi. It stars Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro as Ovidio Mainardi, a man who pushes buttons all day in a factory and endures a marriage that finds his wife (Martine Brochard) giving her body to her boss to get ahead. There’s a scene early on where someone in his office explains why they keep the rats in a lab divided, as otherwise they will always attack one another. And there’s always one rat that starts biting the others.

He and his co-workers Giacomo (Gianfranco De Grassi) and Peppi (Guido Di Carli) go from starting riots at soccer matches to stealing cars to acts of outright insanity, including one scene where a nude Dallesandro chases a woman while driving a forklift, impaling her against a wall. Before long, the three of them are doing pretty much anything they want, as the police think the killings are politically motivated or the acts of southern Italians, exposing the racism within the country at the time.

The film tries to explain that blame away. Much like Ovidio and his marriage, Giacomo is overwhelmed by his crumbling home and abrasive neighbors, while Peppi is trapped in a home with generations of relatives living on top of each other. The film doesn’t make them seem innocent. But it does show how the modern world has dehumanized them and force them to explode into violence in a world that simply does not care.

Inspector Santagà (Enrico Maria Salerno, Inspector Morosini in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the Italian voice of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s films) is a cop who has been demoted for his violent way of dealing with crime and is also a man on his way toward retirement. Only he’s able to see exactly who the killers are, which is a surprise to him, as he knows Ovidio from computer lessons he’s been taking to try to remain relevant as the world passes him by.

Vittorio Salerno only directed three other movies (No, the Case Is Happily Resolved; Libido and Notturno con Grida), but I really enjoyed this and can’t wait to track down the rest of his films. This was written by Salerno with Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, The Sweet Body of Deborah and more than one hundred more movies).

Savage Three is a powerful and brutal film. It’s like a fantasy-free A Clockwork Orange that could happen at any time, even today.

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, Like Rabid Dogs, Highway Racer, Colt 38 Special Squad and No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. This disc has an interview with director Vittorio Salerno and actress Martine Brochard about Savage Three. You can get it from MVD.

The first script by Mark Hanna (The Amazing Colossal Man) and the second from Charles B. Griffith (Death Race 2000), Gunslinger is one of the few times that director Roger Corman found himself going over schedule.

Corman may have claimed that Gunslinger could have bee “one of the worst experiences of my life” and Allison Hayes may have wanted to leave the film during shooting — she broke her arm slipping in mud and Corman still shot close-ups while she was waiting for the ambulance, but at least star Beverly Garland enjoyed herself. In the book Beverly Garland: Her Life and Career, she said, “I think I was the first woman to play a marshal in a movie western. Roger would often cast against type in those days. I could never resist a plum role like a lady marshal in a genre that would never have considered such a gender reversal like that before.”

She played Rose Hood, who has become the marshall of Oracle, Texas after her husband is killed. Erica Page (Allison Hayes), the owner of a saloon — man, this town was woke early — gets into a fight with our heroine because she doesn’t want to close at 3 AM. To get back at her, Erica hires a killer to murder the temporary marshall.

Seriously, this movie totally goes wild by the end with nearly every character killed off. Corman said, “My Texas distributor arrived in the city where I was filming and asked me how it was going. I told him that I thought that it was good but that there was too much violence and passion, and he answered, “Roger, I’ve been in this business for forty years, and you’ve been in it for just two. Let me tell you that no one has ever made a film with too much passion and violence.” So I pressed on. Everyone was dying. At the end of the film half of the city was dead.”

Honestly, it doesn’t matter how good this movie is. It’s already won with a title like Jurassic Shark. I mean, that’s some Jerry Gross-level ingenuity at play.

A megalodon is unleashed by an oil rig after it goes too far into the earth. Well, we all knew fracking was going to lead to this. And by this, I mean a movie where a prehistoric shark goes after a gang of art thieves.

This movie employs one of the greatest tools in the exploitation arsenal: long, meaningless stretches of walking that pad the film out and add to its running time. For a movie about sharks and the ocean, even I was astounded by just how much walking there was in this movie.

Also, I feel kind of bad telling you just how horrendous the shark looks in this movie. I think thats a foregone conclusion that a direct to streaming shark movie is going to have horrible CGI, so I feel like you should come in with low expectations and then see if you can go lower than that.

This movie also uses another weapon in the low budget filmmakers arsenal. It has twelve minutes of credits and fifty minutes of actual movie, meaning that 19% of this movie is devoted to watching the names of the people who made it.

At one point, this was the lowest rated movie on IMDB, which I feel is being somewhat unfair. There’s bad and then there’s boring bad and this is just bad, which is a nice thing to say.

Does director Brett Kelly like sharks? Well, your answer is in the fact that he also made Ouija Shark and Raiders of the Lost Shark. You have to give him credit for knowing how to come up with a good title.

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

Originally known as The Legend of the Mad Axeman, this film tells the story of an urban legend who just may be true, an insane man with an axe who has killed in the past and has now returned to murder again. I mean, that new title — Axecalibur — and the poster art totally got this on in my DVD player before everything else in my to watch stack.

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

Writer/director/t-shirt designer/sound man and probably everything else Mike B. Anderson went from creating this to working on The Simpsons. None of that will prepare you for this movie.

Michael Mikaele is in an insane asylum, a place where his doctor assaults him while he sleeps in a coma, trapped in his mind, a victim of the past where he’s made t-shirts for the last eight years. He once made a shirt for a girl and it said Foxy Lady, but she left him, took the money from the profits and now he keeps making that shirt day after day after day. And when he tries to escape, he just ends up at parties where every woman seems to be wearing that Foxy Lady shirt.  Finally, after a series of t-shirts with the logos of body organs come out of his chest, he ends up back where the film started.

Somehow, New Concorde got the rights to this movie and had to figure out how to sell it. Maybe make it seem like a sex comedy instead of a voyage into arty sadness? Or do what they did in Argentina and change the title to Sexy Lady? Can you imagine being a horny teen and renting this, then realizing that you got a paean to hopelessness?

You can watch this on YouTube.