José Ramón Larraz loves the London countryside, a mood that can best be described as oppressive and the near-constant threat of psychosexual violence.

Paul (Malcolm Terris) and his mistress Olivia (Sibyla Grey, also from Whirlpool) break down outside the home of taxidermy enthusiast Julian (Karl Lanchbury, keeping up his maniacal streak of Larraz villains after Whirlpool) and his sister Rebecca (Lisbet Lundquist, who was also…yes, you get it now).

If you break down in the middle of the night in the foggy woods of England, let me give you some advice. Don’t go in the house.

Olivia quickly passes out and Paul decides to snoop around and becomes part of the orgy happening in the house before he’s quickly dispatched after daring to get aroused around Rebecca after she forces him to have sex with one of her female followers at gunpoint.

Yes, there are some true issues in this house.

Then, despite being warned that everyone in that house will try to kill her, Olivia doesn’t even worry about where her lover has gone. She smokes some weed and then gets hooked on heroin after the brother and sister keep trying to seduce her.

Rebecca scoring some heroin and then decimating an old pharmacist who becomes attracted to her is just one of the many strange things that happens, but Olivia says that being hooked on smack is better than the boredom of dating Paul. And then she sees one of his tattoos framed up on the wall, she learns that she better escape.

You want another reason to love this? Stelvio Cipriani rips off Black Sabbath in the main theme for the movie.

Larraz made some wild movies that haven’t been seen enough. Let’s fix that now.

She died with her boots on — and not much else.

Yes, José Ramón Larraz didn’t do anything subtle, huh?

Sarah (Pia Andersson) is a woman of a certain age living in the countryside of London with another shutterbug named Theo (Karl Lanchbury) in a relationship that has them refer to one another as aunt and nephew. Sara invites a model named Tulia (Vivian Neves) to stay with them and be photographed; the very first session goes poorly as Tulia sees a hooded figure spying on her. She shares that this same thing happened when her friend Rhonda (Johanna Hegger) stayed at the house and that something was wrong with the lake.

That night, everyone gets drunk, the ladies get naked and Theo and Tulia make love whole Sarah looks at photos of Rhonda when what she really wanted was a threesome. Things get stranger when Mr. Field comes looking for evidence of Rhonda and Theo sets him up to nearly assault Tulia while he films it.

Of course, all is soon forgiven and that menage a trois ends up happening. Moments later, Mr. Field is stabbed to death by Theo, who follows that up by confessing to Tulia that he’s a sadist as she stares at photos of Rhonda being abused by multiple men. She tries to run through the woods but he catches up to her and snuffs her out.

In case you wonder why Roger Ebert said that this movie had “particularly grisly sort of violence, photographed for its own sake and deliberately relishing in its ugliness. It made me awfully uneasy,” it would be because this movie is, well, shocking and brutal at almost every opportunity.

As you can imagine, this movie was cut to pieces when it first played in England. Also released as Perversion Flash, Flash Light and She Died with Her Boots On, this feels like the first version of Larraz’s superior Symptoms. That said — it’s still pretty effective.

The Schoolteacher In the House is directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, whose film La Liceale is a major success of the commedia sexy all’italiana genre. He also made Massacre In Dinosaur Valley and The Sword of the Barbarians.

I always find it amusing that Luciano Martino wrote the stories for these movies (the script is by Tarantini, Francesco Milizia, Marino Onorati and Jean Louis) and his wife at the time, Edwige Fenech, is the star. In the third L’insegnante movie, she again plans a different teacher — piano instructor Luisa De Dominicus — and finds herself dealing with the horrible world of men, like her boyfriend Ferdinando “Bonci” Marinott, a politician who lets her think he’s single.

All of the dirty old men that live in her apartment building think that the piano playing is just a cover for Luisa being a lady of the evening, so they drill a hole between her apartment and the bedroom of the landlord’s son Marcello Busatti. Marcello has an unrequited love for her, but if she’s in the world’s oldest profession, there’s no way he can bring her to his family.

Obviously, Fenech deserves so much better than this movie, but one hopes that she made some decent money from it.

Filmed across India at all the sites of the Beatles’ visits — Mumbai, New Delhi, Rishikesh and Dehradun — and featuring an array of unseen photographs, footage and interviews uncovered in India during research on the project — including unseen footage from a film shot at the ashram but never released and an interview with George Harrison recorded with All India Radio unheard since it was recorded in 1966 — The Beatles In India tells how George, John, Paul and Ringo took a break from their lives as the biggest band in the world to travel to a remote Himalayan ashram in search of spiritual enlightenment and ended up unleashing an entirely new level of creativity from the band.

This movie seeks to answer two questions: How did India influence perhaps the most important musicians of the 20th century? And how did The Beatles change India?

Co-director Ajoy Bose also wrote the book Across the Universe to mark the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ historic trip to Rishikesh. At the time they visited, he was just a young boy fighting with his father over his mop top hair. Joining with cultural researcher and co-director Pete Compton, Bose seeks to answer those questions and show why this moment united and transformed two very different worlds.

The band’s three-year immersion in Indian culture and studying Transcendental Meditation under teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a moment in time that fascinates me. I loved the end of the film, as Indian musicians share just how important The Beatles were to them. The world can be a better place, if we want it, and this film is a great reminder of how it can happen, even if there are some rough patches and strangeness along the way. It does not shy away from the issues of the Maharishi nor the death of Brian Epstein.

If you love music, culture, history and learning, you must experience this.

You can get The Beatles and India from MVD. You can learn more at the official site.

Director Jean-François Richet and writer James DeMonaco — who went on to create The Purge series — had quite a challenge: how do you remake a John Carpenter classic?

After a failed sting operation, Detroit Police Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) has hit rock bottom as he’s placed on desk duty at the soon-to-be-closed Precinct 13. On New Year’s Eve, a skeleton crew of  Roenick, officer Jasper O’Shea (Brian Dennehy) and secretary Iris Ferry (Drea de Matteo) are all that’s in the station when psychiatrist Alexandra Sabian (Maria Bello) comes to evaluate Roenick and Marion Bishop  (Laurence Fishburne), Beck (John Leguizamo), Anna (Aisha Hinds) and Smiley (Ja Rule) all end up being transferred due to a snowstorm.

Masked gunmen soon arrive and demand that Bishop be sent to them. They’re not his henchmen. Instead, they’re corrupt cops under the leadership of Captain Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), Bishop’s former partner. Soon, the precinct is under attack by a series of bad cops and SWAT teams, all wanting to kill the prisoners and cops who are aiding them.

The film makes several inversions — Bishop was a cop’s name in the original, Roenick’s codename Napoleon was the name of the criminal — and also remembers that the first movie was a remake of Rio Bravo by having the star of that movie, Dean Martin, on the soundtrack.

Did they succeed in updating the movie? Well, I’m partial to the original. It’s shocking in its intense violence and very of its time. This feels like just about any other action movie.

When asked how he feels about remakes of his films, Carpenter said to The Guardian, “If they pay me, it’s wonderful. If they don’t pay me, I don’t care. I think it’s unfair if they don’t pay me. I think everyone should pay me. Why not? I’m an old guy now and I need money. Send me money.”

You cen get the Mill Creek blu ray of Assault On Precinct 13 from Deep Discount.

Cross My Heart (1987): Armyan Bernstein is usually known as a producer, but he directed and co-wrote this movie with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman co-creator Gail Parent.

It has similarities to When Harry Met Sally as David Morgan (Martin Short) and Kathy (Annette O’Toole) — our lead couple — are continually advised by their respective friends Bruce (Paul Reiser) and  Nancy (Joanna Kerns). Now, they prepare themselves for their third date, the one where they may finally make love, and more importantly the one where they’ll reveal themselves for better or worse to one another.

It’s an interesting film, as I never saw Short as a sexual romantic lead before and there it is. This is a movie where their conversation nearly happens in real time. O’Toole is gorgeous and if you have a strange crush on short, well…allow this to be your film.

Pure Luck (1991): One of Becca’s favorite movies, Pure Luck has Martin Short in the traditional role you know and enjoy him for, as a bad luck office worker who can’t help but be overly sure of hismelf despite destroying everything in his path.

Directed by Nadia Tass and written by Francis Veber (it’s based on his French movie La chèvre and it’s not the only movie he made that got remade by Hollywood; there’s also Le Grand Blond Avec une Chaussure Noire (The Man with One Red Shoe), L’emmerdeur (Buddy Buddy), La Cage aux Folles (The Birdcage), Le Jouet (The Toy), Les Comperes (Fathers’ Day), Le Diner de Cons (Dinner for Schmucks) and Les Fugitifs ( Three Fugitives)), Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris.

Short’s Eugene Proctor is just as clumsy as his boss’ missing daughter Valerie (Sheila Kelley), so a psychologist named Monosoff (Harry Shearer) decides that he’d be the perfect person to find her. To ensure that he doesn’t screw up, he’s assigned Raymond Campanella (Danny Glover) to the rescue trip to Puerto Vallarta.

In an interview, Tass said, “It was successful in a financial sense but not in a satisfying sense. It was congenial doing a Martin Short comedy, but American comedy is different from Australian comedy. It is broader. American audiences enjoyed Pure Luck, but audiences in other countries did not enjoy it so much with the exception of the Germans. I wanted to do something else with the comedy and so did Danny Glover. I would like to have put a lot more pathos and pain into it. But they wanted a comedy for America.”

He still gets residuals from the film, so there’s that.

It’s a silly film that has a stand out scene with Short’s face swelling up from a bee sting that never fails to make me laugh. Yeah, it’s not much, but if you get one laugh from it, can it be that bad?

You can get the Mill Creek Martin Short Double Feature – Cross My Heart / Pure Luck from Deep Discount.

The Schoolteacher Goes to Boys’ High finds Edwige Fenech playing a different schoolteacher — Monica Sebastiani instead of Giovannona — but the idea is still the same. All Italian men are pent-up sticks of dynamite and Fenech is, as always, the glorious match.

Director Mariano Laurenti, who also wrote the story that screenwriters Franco Mercuri and Francesco Milizia worked from, made a whole bunch of these movies that have sexy often right in the name, if not the movie.

Everybody is even more repressed before Fenech arrives because this is an all-Catholic boy’s school, but isn’t Edwige the best argument for God?

Most of the first film’s cast returns, all as new characters. Also coming back? A big shower scene, slap happy fight scenes and more farts than Terrence Hill after a four day bean bender.

If all this movie did was make the poster that went with it, life worked out.

A day before his new television show Cry Me Dry goes on the air, it gets canceled and nothing actor Eddy Pine (Bodhi Elfman) says or does can get it back. His Hollywood career over before it’s begun, Eddy drinks himself into oblivion while dealing with a clown who shoves a mind-controlling obelisk up his ass which he gives birth to the next morning.

If this sounds like a movie you’d be into from that first paragraph, let me ice the cake: this was directed and written by Richard Elfman (Forbidden Zone)!

Eddy must protect his life — and the universe — as the obelisk is at the center of an interstellar war between clowns and aliens. Now, Earth — and Eddy’s ass — have become the battlefield.

As Eddy would soon say, “My mother’s a junkie wh***. My father’s an alien from outer space. Killer clowns are out to get me. My a**hole’s the portal to the Sixth Dimension and they canceled my f***ing series! Do you really think everything’s going to be ok?”

To battle Clown Emperor Beezel-Chugg (Verne Troyer) and a mind-controlled human clown (Nik Novicki) and his oversized chicken-suited partner Lenny (Steve Agee) as well as stay ahead of the Men in Black and masturbating green aliens, Eddy must join forces with his female-identifying trans brother Jumbo (Steve Agee), an expert on the unknown named Professor von Scheisenberg (French Stewart) and the professor’s gorgeous Swedish assistants Helga Svenson (Rebecca Forsythe) and Inga Svenson (Angeline-Rose Troy), who both fall for our hero.

Somehow, this also has George Wendt as a priest.

This is a movie filled with bathroom humor, puke, political incorrectness and, yes, aliens and clowns. If you want to see a movie that is silly for the sake of being silly without worrying what anyone cares about it, choose this one.

You can get this from MVD.

The American (2010): Based on the 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth, The American finds George Clooney playing Jack, a gunsmith and contract killer, who is also known as Edward when he gets spotted, a fact that he finds him killing his lover Ingrid (Irina Björklund) to keep from being found out.

He leaves for Castelvecchio, a small town in the mountains of Abruzzo, where he begins a relationship with two women: a prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido) and Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), who asks him to build a special rifle. Yet at every turn, others are hunting him.

Jack/Edward regrets his life and killing Ingrid, so he confesses to Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and tries to imagine a world where he can be with Clara, all while Mathilde readies to use the gun he made to kill him.

With allusions to the films of Leone and Don’t Look Now, director Anton Corbijn and writer Rowan Joffé have created an intriguing film with no real heroes.

Leatherheads (2008): Directed by star George Clooney from a script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, Leatherheads is about the start of American football. Clooney plays Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, the captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, who is trying to save his team and football as a whole as it struggles to catch on He convinces war hero and college football star Carter “the Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski) to the team. He’s a combination of University of Illinois football star Harold “Red” Grange, who signed to a contract with the Chicago Bears the day after his last football game and Alvin York, the controversial Medal of Honor winner whose fame led to Sergeant York, the Gary Cooper movie.

The team and the league succeed as a result of this, but when reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) learns the truth, she feels duty bound to report it. The entire world doesn’t believe her until Dodge plays a prank — much like Clooney in real life — and gets Carter to speak the truth.

This movie speaks to the truth of media heroism, how football became an organized and reputable — well, somewhat — sport and the men that played the game. It’s also really well done.

You can get the Mill Creek George Clooney Double Feature of The American and Leatherheads from Deep Discount.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening lines of dialogue in a horror film — heck, just about any genre of film — are, “Hey, what kind of a freak are you? Why are you singin’ hymns when I’m tryin’ to give you head?”

Depending on your politics, it’s a toss-up as to whether writer/director Walt Davis’ Evil Come, Evil Go was meant to be a horror film with softcore porn or a softcore horror porn with horror. The amount of deliberate humor vs. unintentional comedy is probably up for debate, as well.

Filled with adult film actors and crew including Davis himself, the movie is a real mind-bender. Sarah Jane Butler (Cleo O’Hara) travels the country living her very personal version of following the Bible, ridding the world of what she considers evil men and pleasurable sex by picking random dudes up at seedy bars and then having sex with them, slicing them up just as they are about to achieve orgasm. In Los Angeles — where you could get a hot dog and a soft drink for 53 cents in 1974, as captured for posterity here — she meets up with lesbian silver spooner disowned by her family Penny (Sandra Henderson) and indoctrinates her as the first member of Sarah’s “Sister Sarah’s Sacred Order of The Sisters of Complete Subjugation,” which basically means she now has a partner in crime. The two knock off men together in nasty ways, and Penny’s girlfriend Junie (Jane Louise AKA Jane Tsentas) isn’t off limits, either.

It’s hard to say which is the worst in this movie: the acting, the nominees for least sexiest sex scenes in the history of horror and possibly adult cinema (including multiple zoom-ins to vulvae that come across as more clinical than anything erotic), or the poor ADR. The wildly inappropriate score, which changes randomly from one style to another — I counted at least 3 times during a single sex scene that wasn’t long enough to warrant that — is also a head scratcher.

Everyone except O’Hara, is marvelously over the top, is acting like they’re merely reciting memorized lines — with a couple of instances of lines evidently forgotten and then immediately repeated correctly. With as many flubbed lines as there are, I wouldn’t be surprised that many scenes were single takes.

If you are easily offended by, well, just about anything, this movie should press at least a couple of your buttons. If you are not yet sold into experiencing Evil Come, Evil Go at least once, know that there is a cat that randomly jumps into and out of sex and bondage scenes, not to mention a recurring soft rock theme song that has a hilarious, if question-raising, payoff.                     

The version shown at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival is a restoration courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome and the American Genre Film Archive, which looks and sounds quite impressive.

Evil Come, Evil Go screens as part of South Korea’s hybrid Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, which takes place in Bucheon and online July 7–17, 2022. For more information, visit http://www.bifan.kr/eng/