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.

A war film implementing genre movie elements, writer/director Ben Parker’s U.K. feature Burial involves a small crew of Russian soldiers secretly bringing Hitler’s body to Stalin. German soldiers bent on obtaining the body for themselves in an effort to continue the Nazi line by proclaiming that the body is a fake and Hitler is still alive await the Russians in Polish woods, with the locals trapped between the two forces. The Nazis hiding in the forest — called werewolves to induce terror — use psychotropic drugs and fear-inducing costumes to make the Russians believe they are being attacked by werewolves and other occult entities.

The film kicks off with elderly exile Brana Vasilyeva (Harriet Walter) turning the tables on a home invasion by a neo-Nazi (David Alexander) bent on learning the truth about Hitler having not really committed suicide. She handcuffs and drugs him, at which point Burial goes to an extended flashback about young Brana (Charlotte Vega of Wrong Turn (2021) and The Lodgers (2017) and her comrades attempting to bring Hitler’s body, which they must bury every night to keep it hidden from Nazis, to Stalin. Walter and Vega both give outstanding performances in their roles, and the supporting cast members are all quite good, though several of the latter are given trope-heavy characters with which to deal, from the no-goodnik commanding officer to the valiant comrade who seems unkillable to the “Kill them all!” Nazi commander. 

Parker (The Chamber, 2019) does a fine job at the helm, delivering a good deal of suspense and peppering the proceedings with some mystery and gore. Viewers expecting actual lycanthropes will likely be disappointed, but those in the mood for a captivating war thriller with admirable production values should find plenty to enjoy in Burial.   

Burial, from IFC Midnight, is available in select theaters and On Demand from September 2, 2022. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Legend of the Werewolf was not produced by Cannon. It was, however, released on video in Germany by Cannon Screen Entertainment.

No matter what you think of this movie, you have to give it up for the poster. This is truly one of my all-time favorite movie posters of all time, one that punches you in the face and says, “You’re gonna watch this werewolf movie!”

It has a different origin story than a normal werewolf film, as here Russian werewolves kill a man who has just watched his wife die in childbirth and then raise the dead parents’ son to become a human wolf.

He’s known as Etoile the Wolf Boy in the circus, but soon loses his lupine look until the full moon rises. When that does — and he kills a member of the traveling carnival — he goes on the run.

This is really the sad tale of a wolf boy — a wolf young adult, I guess — who falls in love with a courtesan with a heart of gold who keeps on entertaining her clients, who soon get devoured by said wolf young adult.

Enter Professor Paul Cataflanque (Peter Cushing). He’s a forensic pathologist, who quickly figures out that a wolf is behind all the murders. And seeing how Etoile now takes care of the wolves in the zoo, he’s going to have to deal with putting every one of them to sleep under the orders of the police.

There’s no way he isn’t going to turn into a werewolf and kill just about everyone, right?

Legend of the Werewolf is one of seven Tyburn Film Productions, a studio that tried to fill the void felt after Hammer stopped producing new movies. Their other films include The Ghoul, Tales That Witness Madness, Persecution, Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death, Murder Elite and Peter Cushing: A One-Way Ticket to Hollywood.

Directed by Freddie Francis, this was written by Anthony Hinds under his pseudonym John Elder. Under that name, he also wrote Hammer’s werewolf film The Curse of the Werewolf as well as Frankenstein Created Woman, Scars of Dracula, The Reptile and many more.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on June 1, 2022. It was not produced by Cannon, but was released on video in Germany by Cannon Screen Entertainment, who called it John Carpenter’s Das Philadelphia Experiment. 

One of the greatest memories of my life is a vacation to Washington D.C. when I was 12. I can’t remember it as being perfect. We didn’t have much money, we had to sleep in our van at least one night, we almost got caught in a flood and it was blistering hot. But that stuff never mattered. And sure, I’d come home to my first days of awkward middle school and wondering if I’d ever fit in. But for one blissful night, I sat under the stars somewhere in Virginia and saw a drive-in double feature while eating snuck in sandwiches we made from ham salad and bread we bought cheap at a local grocery store.

PSA: Don’t sneak food into drive-ins. There are so few in the U.S. and many of them survive based on their food sales. Spend a lot on food. Get a Chilly Dilly, the personality pickle.

The first movie we saw was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a mind-blasting onslaught of adventure, non-stop shreiking, monkey brains being eaten right out of their skulls and chest tearing gore. Years later, that film’s writers, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, would do the same thing to me all over again with their classic Messiah of Evil, a movie I was in no way prepared for at a pre-pubescent age.

The second film — which we knew nothing about — was The Philadelphia Experiment.

Based on the book The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by Charles Berlitz (yes, the very same Berlitz that was part of the family that is The Berlitz School of Languages, as well as a military intelligence officer accused of inventing mysteries and fabricating evidence, which we now call disinformation) and William L. Moore (who circulated the Majestic-12 document that later in my teenage years would overload my Commodre 64 and convince a seventeen-year-old  possibly on drugs me that government troops were coming out of the woods to silence me and kill my family; I woke everyone up and ran into the yard screaming, I was a handful; Moore is also a disinfo agent), the original script for this movie was written by John Carpenter, who couldn’t figure out how it should end, never mind that it was based on a true story.

On that real story: An ex-merchant marine named Carl M. Allen sent an anonymous package marked “Happy Easter” that was Morris K. Jessup’s book The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects filled with notes in three blue inks to the U.S. Office of Naval Research. These notes discuss how UFOs fly, discuss alien races and show that aliens are worried that the book knows too much and refer to the Philedelphia Experiment.

Allen then started writing to Jessup as himself and Carlos Miguel Allende warning him to stop studying flying saucers. He claimed that  he was serving aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth and saw the actual event as the ship teleported from Philedelphia to Norfolk, Virginia and then back, during which he saw crewmembers go insane, become intangible and frozen within time. Jessup asked for info which Allen never really proved.

So this is where it gets weird. Well, weirder. Jessup was invited to the Office of Naval Research where he was shown that annotated book and realized that it had the same handwriting as Allen. Why?

Can it get weirder? Sure.

Commander George W. Hoover, one of the members of the Office of Naval Research, showed the annotations to a contractor named Austin N. Stanton, who was the president of Varo Manufacturing Corporation. Stanton got so obsessed that he used his office’s mimeography machine to print multiple copies of the letters and the annotated book. Keep in mind that this was super expensive in the late 50s and also went against so many laws and levels of security clearance.

So what happened to Jessup? No one wanted to read his books, he lost his agent and he eventually committed suicide. As others tried to find Allen, his family would only say that he was a master leg puller. He was also from New Kensington, Pennsylvania — so close to Pittsburgh. They gave researchers tons more of his handwritten notes on the subject.

Whew — yes I will get to the movie — the Varo annotations were used in several conspiracy and UFO books, finally gaining some interest thanks to Berlitz and Moore. Then the movie got made. And then, another sailor named Alfred Bielek claimed he was also on the ship and that the movie was totally accurate. That’s funny because the book ripped off another book, George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger’s Thin Air.

Let me stop for a second and tell you that this movie has even crazier DNA.

That’s because it was directed by Stewart Raffill.

Sure, he made The Ice Pirates the same year. But afterward, his career is filled with the kind of movies that crush minds. Movies like Mac and Me. Mannequin 2: Mannequin on the Move. Tammy and the T-Rex.

Yes, all the same director.

By the time he got to this movie, the script had been written nine times. Despite Michael Janover (who wrote the horrifying Hardly Working), William Gray (Humongous, Prom Night) and Wallace C. Bennett (Silent Scream, Welcome to Arrow Beach) being in the credits for the script, Raffill says that he dictated the script and had someone type it.

As for the story, United States Navy sailors David Herdeg (Michael Pare) and Jim Parker (Bobby Di Cicco in 1943 and Ralph Manza in 1984) are on the USS Eldridge in 1943 as Doctor James Longstreet (Miles McNamara in the past, Eric Christmas — who was Mr. Carter in Porky’s — in 1984) makes the ship invisible to radar, but as things go wrong, David and Jim jump overboard and end up in the future — or our past are you confused? — and kidnap Allison Hayes (Nancy Allen) and get into military related hijinks before Jim gets zapped back in time.

There’s some wild science in here as David eventually has to go into a vortex and smash stuff with a fire axe to free the ship, which ends up with burned sailors and men being fused into the ship.

A sequel came out in 1993 with Brad Johnson from Nam Angels as David going up against Gerrit Graham as well as 2012 SyFy reimagining that Pare shows up for. Man, Michael Pare also made Streets of Fire the very same year and really should have been better considered.

This movie went from theaters to video stores faster than any movie had before. Maybe people thought that they had already seen it as The Final Countdown.

None of that is important to me. I have a wonderful memory of sitting in movie theater seats — outside no less — and getting to see two wild movies that I’ve thought of so many times since. We should all have a vacation so wonderful.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Superman 3 was not produced by Cannon, but they did release it in Germany on the Cannon Screen Entertainment label.

I always wonder, what was the exact moment where people went from thinking The Great Train Robbery was some kind of black magic and the train was going to kill everyone in the theater to watching a movie and saying, “That was boring.”

For ten-year-old Sam, it may have been this movie.

Just four years earlier, I laid on my stomach in the back of my parent’s station wagon and pretended I was flying the whole way home from Superman.

So what happened?

This movie sucks is what happened.

Sure, it’s written again by husband and wife team David and Leslie Newman and Richard Lester, who took over from a movie nearly already shot by Richard Donner in Superman II, directed. But I have no idea why this movie is about what it’s about. I was a hardcore Superman reader as a kid and I kept thinking, “Will Brainiac be in this? The Parasite? The Atomic Skull? Would Dudley Moore play Mister Mxyzptlk?”

How about Richard Pryor?

Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder were said to have been angry with the way the Salkinds treated Donner, with Hackman retaliating by refusing to reprise the role of Lex Luthor. This is a rumor and Hackman has denied it, but he definitely refused to return for the Lester shot scenes in the second film. And when Kidder gave interviews about how the Salkinds treated Donner, she was written out of this movie for the most part — the cover story was that the Lois and Clark relationship had been “played out” in the first two film — and was replaced with Lana Lang (Annette O’Toole).

The other big bad is the rich Ross “Bubba” Webster (Robert Vaughn). He keeps trying to take over the world’s supply of needed elements, like coffee and oil. Superman keeps getting the best of him and he finds that August “Gus” Gorman (Pryor) is good with stealing money through complicated computer systems — Office Space was inspired by his big plan — and uses him to destroy Superman.

Huh?

Superman ends up getting seduced by Lorelei Ambrosia (Pamela Stephenson) who somehow gets him to destroy an oil tanker and then Ross’ sister Vera Webster (Annie Ross) ends up being a cyborg and oh yeah, Superman ends up splitting into two halves after a nervous breakdown with one side being a dark Superman and a good Clark Kent. They fight in a junkyard and Superman comes back, only for a supercomputer to learn how to make kryptonite and man, I hate this movie.

I absolutely hate this movie.

You know when Marvel fans complain about so much comedy and She-Hulk twerking and the Snyder cut? Let them have this movie. Ten-year-old Sam was beyond mad, the kind of mad that doesn’t go away. Ever. In my lifetime. I mean, a rumor that Tony Danza was going to take over shows that this movie could have been even worse.

This is a movie where evil Superman rights the Leaning Tower of Pisa and blows out the Olympic flame.

Oh no, Superman. How will we recover?

Then again, Brad Wilson, the rival of Superman for the affections of Lana, is Gavin O’Herlihy and just three years later, Charles Bronson would shoot him with a rocket launcher.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Amityville II: The Possession was not produced by Cannon but was released on VHS in Germany by Cannon Screen Entertainment. Want to know more about every Amityville sequel? Click here for that exploration into the possessed world of 112 Ocean Avenue.

It doesn’t matter to me whether or not The Amityville Horror is truth or fiction. The truth is that the original film isn’t all that exciting. But the sequel? Holy shit — the sequel is pretty much everything you want in a movie — if you love movies filled with horrifyingly sick moments of glee.

Damiano Damiani, whose 1960’s and 1970’s western and crime output were marked by a streak of social criticism, directed this film from a screenplay by Tommy Lee Wallace (who not only played Michael Myers in the original Halloween, but would go on to direct Halloween III: Season of the Witch and the original version of It).

The film is actually a prequel, telling the story of the Montellis, who are based upon the DeFeo family. Anthony (Burt Young from Rocky) is the father of this brood. He’s rude, ill-tempered and ready to abuse everyone at a moment’s notice. If you’re looking for any family values — in fact, any values at all — you’re watching the wrong film.

He’s married to Dolores (Rutanya Alda, Carol Ann from Mommie Dearest), his long-suffering and very Catholic wife. They have four kids — Sonny, Patricia (Diane Franklin, Monique from Better Off Dead, as well as TerrorVision and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), Mark and Jan. Even from the very beginning of the film, the family is on edge. Every single interaction between them is marked by weirdness before we even get into the occult portion of this film.

Things get worse — much worse — after a tunnel is found in the basement. This leads to doors knocking all night long and demonic messages showing up in the youngest kids’ room. Turning to the Church, Dolores tries to have Father Frank Adamsky bless the house. That lasts for all of ten seconds before Anthony flips out and throws the priest out.

When he gets to his car, the door is open and his Bible is torn apart. Clearly — all is not well. Again — the family is a mess before the Devil even gets involved. Dad is overly strict and abuse, mom clings to the Church and Sonny and Patricia yearn to have sex with one another (seriously, their first interactions define the word creeptastic).

While everyone else goes to church, Sonny stays behind and is taken over by a demonic force. The film nearly descends into body horror as we see the creature take root inside him. Soon, he’s playing fashion photographer with his sister, a game that quickly turns into sex. Instead of her being upset, Patricia instead tells him that she loved it. Keep in mind these are pretty much the two main protagonists of the story, so the tale takes a very Flowers in the Attic turn.

As Sonny becomes more demonic, Patricia decides to confess to Father Adamsky, but breaks down before she can. At Sonny’s birthday party — a scene where this film layers on the insanity — he goes full demon as she freely tries to give herself to him. She decides to call the priest and confess everything, but Father Tom (Simon himself from Simon, King of the Witches, as well as the original version of The Town that Dreaded Sundown) takes the phone off the hook so the priests can go skiing (!!!).

That night, Sonny fully becomes possessed and murders his entire family with shotgun blasts as a voice tells him to “kill them all.” Father Adamsky blames himself and even after the church refuses to allow him to exorcise the demon, he still makes an attempt. The demon goes from Sonny into his soul and the Amityville House is put up for sale…setting up part one.

If you think this is a rough little movie — and trust me, it is — it was even worse in its original cut. Test audiences were assaulted by scenes where Anthony anally rapes his wife Dolores and where the incest is on graphic display (versus being hinted at with an “after the loving” quick cut). Damiano stated that he wanted to really upset viewers. Well, he succeeded, with those scenes going the way of the dodo. A very depraved dodo.

Originally, this film was to be based on John G. Jones’ book The Amityville Horror Part II, but producer Dino De Laurentiis, in conjunction with American International Pictures, decided to be inspired Hans Holzer’s book Murder in Amityville. George Lutz, whose family’s 28-day residency at the haunted house led to the original film, sued and got a disclaimer on the posters for the film stating “This film has no affiliation with George and Kathy Lutz”.”

Even better — Ed and Lorraine Warren, the demonologists who are the basis for The Conjuring series of films — served as the demonology advisors. One only wonders how they felt about the tremendous amount of blasphemy on display here.

This is a film where no traditional structure can save anyone. The family unit is a joke. The Catholic Church does not care. And the police only exist to pick up the pieces at the end. It’s a grimy, gory, gross little film that has more in common with the grindhouse than its major studio origins would suggest.

Long story made short: I love this fucking movie.