EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on September 29, 2021 when I watched this at Fantastic Fest. It’s now streaming on Shudder.

The original title of this movie Minguy Wam is from the Xhosa tongue and translates as Good Madam, as the white madam is at the center of this film, a comatose woman being looked after by Mavis, the mother of Tisdi, this movie’s protagonist. As they live in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town — yet always apart from the city — the darkness within the old woman’s home may engulf everything and everyone.

Directed by Jenna Cato Bass (who co-wrote the script with Babalwa Baartman), this movie may take place decades after the end of apartheid, but the shadow of the past looms large. Tisdi has been estranged from her mother, who has spent the majority of her life with the home of Madam — Diane — and even raised her son Stuart alongside the rich white children.

Only Mavis is allowed to enter the room of the dying woman — which reminds one of Burnt Offerings — while keeping the home immaculate as if the lady of the home could rise at any moment and nothing has changed. Her sacrifices to her duty have even kept Mavis from going to the funeral of her mother.

Why are Mavis and Stuart so comfortable in this home of white privilege and Tsidi so haunted? Why was she rejected and her brother accepted and perhaps even adopted or co-opted? And why have we never seen Madam outside of photos from the past? And when Tisdi’s daughter Winnie been loved by Mavis so easily when a connection between mother and daughter has been such a trial?

As Americans, we may struggle to understand the complicated history of South Africa, but sadly, we all understand the struggles of racism and enduring horrible relationships that only have one worse thought: what if tomorrow is worse than the pain we have endured in the days before?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was not produced by Cannon, but was released on video in the Netherlands by Cannon Screen Entertainment.

For some strange reason, I’ve never seen this despite wanting to watch it for decades. Wild Thing (Robert Knepper) lost his parents to a drug deal and was raised by a homeless woman (Berry Buckley) who taught him how to be a protector for the weak of the city. He’s pretty much an urban Tarzan and even has a social worker love interest named Jane (Kathleen Quinlan). His sidekick is a cat! Come on! That’s incredible.

I kind of loved what I watched and that’s probably because John Sayles (Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars) wrote it along with Larry Stamper, whose other career highlight is writing the dialogue for Scarecrows. Director Max Reid didn’t do much else outside of some shorts and documentaries, but I really liked a lot of the ways he put this together.

Robert Davi and Maury Chaykin play the drug dealer Chopper and the cop Trask who killed Wild Thing’s parents and they stayed in power long enough for him to grow up and get revenge. I wish more people would watch this movie and I’m glad that I finally got to sit down and check it out.

Nora Thompson (Nicole Cinaglia) has become an overnight celebrity when she reports on Senator Morrison’s illegal activities, causing him to kill himself. His daughter Carolyn (Vienna Hayden) responds by kidnapping her and taking her deep into the woods, but now thee enemies must work together to survive because they’re not alone.

Of course, Carolyn was hoping for a The Most Dangerous Game situation, but instead they’re both on the run from a creature. Well, they’re also still arguing despite this supernatural beast hunting them. The majority of the movie uses POV for the monster, which is smart, because it doesn’t look all that frightening when we finally see it.

Director Alexander T. Hwang (Lilith) and writer Deanna Gomez — who worked on the short Ravening Woods together with Cinaglia and Hayden playing the same roles* — try to make this a story about the news media in parts and in others, try and get some scares. The end at least has a nice drone shot that pulls above the screaming survivor.

It’s also another movie that presents two horrible people and asks us to choose which one to cheer for. As always, I am on the side of the monster.

*IMDB lists it as a short but for all I know, it could have two entries for the same film.

Something In the Woods is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

On November 3, 2020, the most monumental presidential election in modern memory was held in the United States. We’d been through four years of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and a growing divide between the people of our country. You know, I do my best not to get political on this site — it’s my escape from that world — but this movie forces me to.

This Land looks at Americans from all walks of life, like a Native American man dealing with his past, an elderly gay couple made up of a white liberal and a black Trump supporter, and a rodeo clown trying to be a good father. They all have someone they want to win.

Director Matthew Palmer doesn’t pick sides or push any narrative in this film. He just documents the stories of people as they prepare to cast their vote. It’s surprising when the gay couple goes home to the liberal partner’s family and how they seem to gang up on the conservative; this makes me think of how we don’t even communciate any longer. We’ve made our minds up. Debates are just endless pro wrestling promos. No one is undecided. Much like our favorite football teams, we’ve all picked our colors and cheer them as they play their game. We’re all just watching the ratchet effect in motion, as Crimethinc once describe as “… the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back.”

I wonder a lot about what the truth is. I think I know, as much as I can, but I have no idea how anyone can see facts and ignore them. How they can see the truth and still willingly move past them or worse, say that those rules don’t matter or that someone is smart because they know the ways around them.

When I hear these voices, I’m reminded of the buillies that battered me in my youth, that dragged me all over a concrete parking lot and left stones embedded in my back and told me they’d kill my parents if I ever told on them. When I saw a man imitate a man who couldn’t stop shaking and laugh and call people snowflakes for being upset, I thought that this wouldd be the end of their campaign, that we’d see through it, but now the streets of my small hometown are lined with flags that say f*** your feelings and people speak in code like FJB and Let’s Go Brandon, but you know, everyone is complicit.

We’re just circling the wagons as we know that the Earth is growing too hot and we have just years, not even decades, to fix it. Everyone knows the problem and there’s nothing we can do short of revolution and that seems too hard. I’m not blameless. Sometimes I sit here all night and just bombard myself with movies and wonder just how I can bring it all together and realize that I can’t.

This movie made me consider those things and wonder if the choice that it presents was even really a choice. I’d like to think it was. But I also feel like we’re all just covering up the truth with bread and circuses.

This Land is out now on digital platforms from Gravitas Ventures.

In 2030, World War III is wiping out most of humanity, save for a small group of survivors who make it into a bunker. Two years later, they decide to head out into the wasteland, but of course, dinosaurs are waiting for them.

Originally called Jurassic Valley, this movie follows those survivors — Daniel (Clint Gordon), Louise (Chelsea Greenwood), Drew (Mark Haldor), Mia (Antonia Whillans) — as they try and make it in the future world. Louise is already pregnant with Daniel’s child, so she’s worried that leaving the safety of their base is a bad idea. Well, she’s right.

Directed and written by Scott Jeffrey (Jurassic Island, Exorcist Vengeance, Dinosaur Hotel, Hatched), this has big ideas and a budget that is in no way ready to bring that vision to life. It does have some CGI dinosaurs that work, many that don’t and a cast larger than you’d expect for the money.

Believe it or not, this is better than Jurassic World Dominion. That’s not the highest of bars, but this makes it through its commitment and also the fact that it isn’t content to just be one movie, it also has Louise go into labor during a dinosaur attack, kind of like A Quiet Place and somewhere the ghost of Bruno Mattei is smiling and saying, “Yes, yes, why take from one movie when you can take from two?”

Kingdom of the Dinosaurs is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Rose (Taysha Farrugia) has just turned nine and every night, she asks her mother Natalie (Kestie Morassi, Wolf Creek) if they can check under the bed for monsters. Even though she does the best she can for her, Natalie still worries that not having a father will hurt her daughter. Now, she has an even greater worry as Rose tells her that she keeps getting pinched by something throughout the night.

Then Natalie wakes up bleeding. She’s taken to the emergency room where she’s told that she’s just had a child, a fact she refuses to believe, even when child services agent Lauren (Jane Badler from V!) comes to investigate. That’s when the bruises show up on Rose’s back and the true mystery begins.

The only hope might be Malcolm Akard (Matthew Crosby) and his psychic daughter Ava (Ellie Stewart) who may be able to find the evil spirit targeting this family. The Surrogate doesn’t give into the herky jerky possession camerawork that has dominated the genre for the last decade. Instead it plays its possessive moments as dark and slow burn as possible, which is a great credit to the skills of director David Willing, who co-wrote this with Beth King.

Surrogate is now available TVOD on Amazon and will be on Tubi and GoogleTV on September 16 from Indie Rights.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie wasn’t produced by Cannon but was released on video by them in the Netherlands on the Cannon Screen Entertainment label.

Todd Howard (Jason Bateman) is the cousin of Scott Howard from the first movie and that won’t do Bateman any favors, as at this point in his career he seemed like the “We have Michael J. Fox at home already” of actors. Luckily, he’d get past this and become a popular performer in his own right.

Todd has recently been accepted into Hamilton University on a full boxing scholarship despite not being any good as an athlete. That’s because when he gets in trouble, he can transform into a werewolf, a fact that nobody really has any problem with and totally seems to be within the rules.

If this movie can’t have Fox, it can have James Hampton, who comes back as Scott’s dad and helps teach Todd how to be humble and not let being a wolf under the full moon — or not, this movie is all over the place — go to his head. Chubby, played by Mark Holton, also comes back for this movie, while the roles of Coach Finstock and Stiles were re-cast with Paul Sand taking over from Jay Tarses and Stuart Fratkin instead of Jerry Levine. That said, there are roles for Kim Darby as Professor Tanya Brooks and John Astin as Dean Dunn.

Director Christopher Leitch wrote Universal Soldier, while the screenwriter of this movie, Tim Kring, would create Crossing Jordan and Heroes.

Bateman’s father Kent directed and wrote The Headless Eyes, so maybe horror was in his blood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey, Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he contributes to Drive-In Asylum. His first article, “Grindhouse Memories Across the U.S.A.,” was published in issue #23. He’s also written “I Was a Teenage Drive-in Projectionist” and “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover” for upcoming issues.

I’ll admit it. I have a soft spot for regional horror films. After all, some of the all-time masterpieces came from places other than Hollywood: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Bastrop and Round Rock, Texas), Night of the Living Dead (Pittsburgh, of course), and Carnival of Souls (Lawrence, Kansas). And there were oddball regional gems like Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey Pine Barrens), Horror High (Irving, Texas), and Last House on Dead End Street (State University of New York at Oneonta). But until recently, I never knew Wichita, Kansas, had its own 1960s entry in the regional horror market.

When reading about exploitation films, you often see the expression “it had a checkered distribution history” bandied about. You know, that’s the description of an exploitation film that passed from fly-by-night distributor to fly-by-night distributor with multiple title changes along the way before landing in obscurity in the home video market. While I’ve kept up with regional horror films for over 50 years, I’d never heard of The Beast from the Beginning of Time because it didn’t even have a checkered distribution history. It had no distribution history. Although completed in 1965, it was never publicly shown until 1981. Most of what I learned about it, I gleaned from an online copy of a newspaper article in The Wichita Eagle-Beacon dated October 23, 1981.

You see, back in 1965, one Tom Leahy was the KARD-TV Channel 3 in Wichita horror host of Nightmare (he was called, imaginatively enough, “The Host”), as well as Major Astro, beloved host of a kids’ show. (He sounds a lot like the Wichita version of Bill Cardille, who for years hosted Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater, along with other shows like The 6 O’Clock Hop and Studio Wrestling). One day, Leahy decided it would be cool to make his own horror movie. So using his station’s staff and facilities and about $10,000, he wrote, directed and starred in The Beast from the Beginning of Time.

The film, about rival archeologists uncovering the remains of a preserved prehistoric man who comes back to life and goes on a killing spree, was filmed in black-and-white with interiors shot at the TV station and at a local farm standing in for the archeological dig. It wound up barely feature length at 58 minutes and looks and sounds for all the world like a 1960s shot-on-16mm remote news report. Even with that short running, it’s a dull affair, certainly no lost gem, enlivened only by scenes of gore that were somewhat surprising for the time. If it had been released back in the day, though, it probably would’ve caused at least a minor sensation among the denizens of Wichita, who would’ve enjoyed spotting their favorite local broadcasters in a theatrical film.

But alas, that was not meant to be. The film was never exhibited and forgotten until KARD unearthed it for a late-night broadcast as a Halloween special on October 30, 1981. The station even got NBC’s resident critic at the time, Gene Shalit (he of the bushy hair and mustache and pithy quip), to give it a bad review in an ill-fated attempt to enhance its camp appeal. Leahy, recognizing the poor quality of his film, apparently thought he could position it as a local cult item, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But alas, that also was not meant to be.

And thus, the history of The Beast from the Beginning of Time proved to be more interesting than the film itself. But you gotta love the chutzpah of those scrappy folks from Wichita. Regional filmmaking forever!

You can catch the Beast in all his regional glory on Tubi.