Six people are trapped in a cabin surrounded by an invisible barrier that traps them. As they explore a nearby graveyard, they find a stone totem pole and then discover that the three demons trapped within are set to be released by their deaths.

The people in this cabin in the woods are Alma Groves (Marissa Tait, Witchouse), Paul Maglia (Jason Faunt, who was Red Power Ranger Wes Collins), Leonard McKinney (Eric W. Edwards, not the adult actor Eric Edwards), Tina Gray (Alicia Lagano), Roz (Sacha Spencer) and Robert Cole (Tyler Anderson) and they’ve all been given a mental message to seek out this cabin and all knew that they would find one another.

Once they find that cemetery with the totem, they also find tombstones that say that tonight will be the last night of all their lives, as their death dates are now carved in stone. Or marble. Or probably styrofoam with this budget.

That’s when Robert bursts in the room carrying a blood-soaked Tina, who speaks in another voice, giving us all the exposition we need: They are all part of a ritual in which three people will be killed and three people to kill them. With each death, one of the statues from the totem pole will come to life and at the close of the ceremony, the new age of blood and fire will begin.

There was also a family — we see their old book and photos early in the movie — who somehow survived this, but these twentysomething teenagers are way too ridiculous to live and must deal with statues and each other.

Written by Neal Marshall Stevens and Charles Band, Totem was directed by David DeCoteau to fulfill a contract. He was given the resources to make Voodoo Academy, but only if he made this film first. It’s really the first of his films where the elements of his current style are apparent. And by that I mean shirtless dudes in danger and sexual tension that you can cut with the stone claws of a totemic demon.

You can also see this as “Master of Death” on the Full Moon remix movie Horrific.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Only David DeCoteau could make a rip-off of Alien starring Linnea Quigley and Ashlyn Gere* boring. I mean, that’s some serious talent right there.

Actually, this movie feels more like a rip-off of Rats: The Night of Terror, which is another amazing thing to actually steal from Bruno Mattei. That’s like psychologically manipulating Charles Manson.

This was so brazen that the tagline was “Move over, Aliens, here come the Creepozoids. Even if you kill them, they’re still deadly.”

Quigley has mentioned that there were supposed to be more sex scenes with her and the monster, which means that this would have also stolen from Galaxy of Terror.

There’s a giant baby, a mutant rat and it’s the best David DeCoteau I’ve seen and it still sucks.

*Ironically, the actresses switched roles because Ms. Gere, who went on to become one of the biggest stars in adult films ever, was uncomfortable with nudity.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Way back to two weeks ago — time has no meaning in a pandemic — we watched “Shallow Graves” in the Full Moon remix anthology The Dead Reborn.

So yeah — this is the full length cut and it’s all about a reality show called Chill Challenge that offers a million dollars to anyone who can survive a haunted house for one night. Has no one learned any lessons in the history of film?

Joe Estevez plays Stan the Investor who sets it all up. Brinke Stevens plays the ghost who is named Head Spectre in the credits. Women are named things like Paige Turner and Rainbow. I’m shocked that there aren’t black and white cans that just say beer in this what with all of the creativity that’s on display.

Somehow, this was called Prison of the Dead 2 as a working title and didn’t end up with that name. Come on, Full Moon. We depend on you for sequels and movies with small creatures that kill normal-sized people.

If you were demanded a version of Halloween: Resurrection that somehow sucked even more, this is your movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Richard Chasen? More like David DeCoteau, who goes all Bruno Mattei recycles the Linnea Quigley shower scene of Creepazoids in the laziest way ever: it’s playing on the TV in a scene.

But hey, you know, why would I complain about a Linnea Quigley shower scene?

Dr. Jordan Grady is hiring male prostitutes to take special eyedrops so that they can see into the eighth dimension, which is totally a fetish I guess, all while his wife sneaks across the street to have a little aardvark sandwich with the neighbors. One of the creatures from the eighth dimension murders one of the rent boys and his eyeball grows horrifically large and starts to assault women, remembering that it is in a Full Moon movie after all.

I mean, how many movies are there where a giant eyeball impregnates women? Maybe its sequel Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt?

This also shows up as “Terror of Vision” in the Horrific anthology.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Victoria Sloane, I see right through you. I know that you’re Dave DeCoteau. You can’t fool me!

Rich twentysomething teenager Kristof St. Pierce has been cut off from his family because he loves the occult and Calvin, who probably led him into this lifestyle of the supernatural. Anyways, Kristof, Michele, Allie and Rory have all gathered for the aforementioned Calvin’s funeral, but of course he’s faked his death — it was Kristof’s idea — to lure them to the Hawthorne Funeral Home, built atop the old Blood Prison, in the hopes that they can all be amateur ghost chasers again. Three other way too old to be high schoolers named Bill, Jeff and Kat are also here, hoping to scare the gang because Kristof slept with Bill’s girlfriend, which is probably something that Calvin will be upset about. Drama! Undead drama!

Blood Prison was a secret jail built by Puritan extremists just so they could go all Mark of the Devil on any heretics and even after burning up witches fell out of favor, they kept doing it. It turns out that Kristof‘s father recently bought the Hawthorne and set up a contest — he hates the paranormal — to prove the existence of the Talon Key, which was used to lock up the three executioners of Blood Prison, as the Puritans were sickened by what they found inside the place.

So rich daddy’s rich son is using this opportunity to win the million dollar prize and validate himself in the eyes of his father. That means a Ouija board gets used, Allie gets possessed and Sickle, Mace, and Scythe — the executioners have names that really get at the heart of their personalities — rise and start killing everyone.

This whole movie came up when DeCoteau was “essentially the only staff director for Charles Band”, where the expectation was that he was to just keep making movie after movie. This movie started with the title Creepies, was shot on the sets of Highlander: Endgame and had a Eurotrash influence, or so DeCoteau claims. And yes, that is the music from Netherworld.

This also appears as “Crypt of the Undead” in the Full Moon remix anthology Horrific and as “Undead Sentence” in The Dead Reborn. Yes, somehow, I watched this movie three times in a week.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the Full Moon remix movie The Haunted Dollhouse, which had a chapter entitled “Worry Dolls.” That was really this movie and somehow, Charles Band directed a movie that was at once a movie about killer dolls and a women in prison movie. If he’d somehow had the prison be in his Italian castle, this would have really been the most Full Moon of all Full Moon movies.

Somehow, this movie also has two more titles, Dangerous Chucky Dolls or Parasite Dolls. No matter the title you see it under, it’s about Eva, who is abused by everyone in the prison, including a — spoiler — trans guard who forces her to participate in webcam sex to make more money for the warden.

One night, she lies down and her worry doll climbs inside her ear and learns how to walk out of the hole in her forehead when it isn’t taking over her brain. This feels like one of the more transgressive Full Moon features I’ve seen in a while, as there aren’t many killer doll WIP movies that have the heroine peg the evil guard.

This was shot in the same place that they made Reform School Girls and it is in no way as great as that movie. But come on. You knew that.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Written, produced and directed by Charles Band — I mean, it has small puppet-like killers and how can we even keep track of the demonic toys, devil dolls, worry dolls and skull heads at this point; also why was this not called Skull Headz and part of Full Moon’s urban films? — this movie starts by having Naomi Arkoff gettingis tortured on a rack for having a cell phone. Obviously, the Arkoff family is non-traditional and they also live in a castle in Italy, which would be the other Charles Band leitmotif.

Those little tiny Skull Heads protect the Arkoff family. Originally, the Romans buried the dead in catacombs and built the home that they live in to guard against grave robbers. And the little guys were created by witchcraft to keep people from messing with the dead.

Can you guess that the Hollywood producers who come to film the castle really want to steal what’s inside the tomb? Also, you may not realize it, but you’re going to watch a family drama that goes on for nearly an hour before the occult comes in, which is…well, it’s exactly the kind of movie I expect from this studio.

Beyond finding this movie under another title — Devious — this also shows up in a cut-down remix within Full Moon’s The Haunted Dollhouse. It may actually be better in this short format because it cuts out all the real people and gets us to what we really want: Skull Heads.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If the films of the 70s — well, let’s say the excesses of Russ Meyer and the drug and biker movies that I love so much — prove to me that there’s no way I would have survived the excesses of the decade.

There’s another truism — the movies of that era have people and imagery that look like no one and nothing else. Yet Anna Biller — who created this and The Love Witch — is the rare filmmaker that is able to recapture that past without merely creating a pastiche that has no heart and soul of its own.

VIVA may take its look and feel from the classic exploitation cinema and vintage Playboy magazines of the early 70s, with the gaudiest apartments outside of a Sergio Martino movie and colors that practically bathe your eyes in a soft and lush bath of joy. Yet on the inside of this taffeta-wrapped box lies hints that 1972 wasn’t always what was seen on drive-in screens.

There aren’t many films that are inspired by both the works of Hugh Hefner and Luis Buñuel — I would say that this is the only one — and for that, the world is a much worse place.

Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the costume and stars in this film, which is the most self-aware movie I’ve seen that features unself-aware characters, which is some kind of meta backflip trickery when you get right down to it.

Barbi (Biller) starts the film happily married to the workaholic Rick, all while dealing with harassment at every turn, from her boss to her friends Mark and Sheila. Yet when her husband continually chooses work over her, she decides that she’s a single woman. And with Sheila also now single, the two ladies decide to go into the oldest of all professions, like something out of a Barry Mahon film.

Can a movie based on films and magazines that pretty much defined the male gaze break through and become a strong piece of feminist art? When it’s as well made as this film, the answer is yes. That said, this is a film that definitely feels like it will work better for an audience who understands camp and has a beyond working knowledge of the material that inspired it.

As I watched a scene where Barbi got ready for her man to come home, I was struck by one of the first women I ever dated that cared about make up. I felt horrible that she was spending so much time putting on a frustrating pair of false eyelashes and said, “You don’t have to do that. I think you look just fine without them.” And she replied, “Maybe I’m not wearing them for you.”

I’m glad that I learned that lesson. And glad that I watched this film.

You can get the new blu ray of VIVA from Kino Lorber, about whom Biller said, ““I am thrilled to work with Kino Lorber, who releases the best classic and contemporary films, and to see VIVA discovered by a whole new group of fans. VIVA is important to me both as a piece of cinema and as a response to the excesses of the sexual revolution, and I’m excited to see the types of conversations it will generate in the era of #Metoo.”

Want to learn more about Anna Biller? Here’s her official website.

Also known as Vampire Resurrection and appearing as “From the Grave” on the I, Vampire remix anthology, Song of the Vampire not only stars Subspecies heroine Denice Duff, but was directed by her as well.

You may be forgiven if you think it fits into the adventures of Radu Vladislas, but it only uses footage from the third movie. Instead, we meet Jonathan, a man who had to sacrifice his own soul and become a vampire in order to find his true love.

Meanwhile, a beautiful young woman, Victoria Thorn (Denice, of coure) dreams of a past time when she had a great love who was Jonathan. Their souls are forever intertwined, as they say at Hot Topic. Will she become a vampire for him?

Man, what favors or blackmail did they have on Geoffrey Lewis to get him to show up in this movie? I know actors have to work, but wow. And Julie Michaels from Point Break and Roadhouse? Is this the most stars a Full Moon movie has had?

Also — the boom mic shows up repeatedly and I could not be happy to see it getting work.

David DeCoteau has a goal of making the “male version of Suspiria” which means that we get a movie where the dialogue says things like “Boys’ tears are the most delicious of all,” and the music from Dark Angel: The Ascent gets reused and so does the exteriors from Subspecies, plus this was shot at the same time as Frankenstein Reborn*. Also, DeCoteau dislocated his elbow halfway through the shoot and toughed out the filming on painkillers, which I would argue made this a better film.

I would assume that by Suspiria the director meant that this had to be set in a foreign school and not anything to do with the color palette, as this looks quite dark and drab. It’s closer to Reform School Girls except it is not self-aware and it’s really all about seeing shirtless boys get murdered on a Satanic altar. And it’s also about dudes in their underwear betting one another about how many push-ups they can do.

There’s also a dude named Theriel the Black Angel who is bald and has glowing red eyes and seems like he’d be a good hang, but is really here to bring about the end of the world so he just roams the halls and rips out human hearts. There is actually a talisman, so the title makes sense. He was brought back to life by said talisman, along with the blood of a baby virgin. Now he gets to set people on fire, which is a way better life than I figure he had the first try.

Also, the Black Ranger is in this. And the only straight relationship in the whole movie ends up being incestual. It also make 78 minutes feel like 78 years and I’m not even going to bring up that the credits take double digit minutes to play.

This was renamed “Evil Never Dies” and cut down to thirty minutes for Full Moon’s Tomb of Terror remix release. Full Moon does so love recycling things. To prove my point even further, they’ve re-released this under a new Fulci sounding title, 7th Gate of Death. Don’t be fooled. It’s the same movie.

*I am not talking down on re-use. Roger Corman made a career out of it. He also made some better movies than the output of Full Moon, but why argue?

You can watch this on Tubi.