If Big Trouble In Little China is the movie equivalent of weed, Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain is some kind of ancient herb found deep within the base of a tree that will get you high for life the moment you even taste it.

Based on Legend of the Swordsmen of the Mountains of Shu by Huanzhulouzhu, director Tsui Hark and writers Shui Chung-yuet and Sze-to Cheuk-hon made modern movie magic — special effects were created by a team of Western artists such as Robert Blalack, John Scheele, Peter Kuran and Arnie Wong — that still looks and feels as visually inventive as it did nearly forty years ago.

Dik Ming-kei (Yuen Biao) is rescued by Master Ding Yan (Adam Cheng) from the vampires that lurk near Zu mountain. They are soon joined by Siu Yu (Damian Lau) and his pupil Yat Jan (Mang Hoi) as they battle the Blood Devil, which will require a quest to find the Dual Swords.

Plus, there’s star power, with Sammo Hung as a Red Army soldier and the sorcerer Chang Mei, Brigitte Lin as the Ice Queen and Corey Yuen as the Devil Disciple Leader.

This is potentially one of the most important Hong Kong movies ever made, if not one of the most important movies ever created.

That said — there’s an international English language version, Zu Time Warriors, which has a 25-minute introduction with Yuen Biao as a fencing champ transported via coma dreams to the story of this film. It also doesn’t have the opening battle scene.

In 2001, Hark made Shu shan zheng zhuan or Zu Warriors, a sequel to this film. It was released in the U.S. by Miramax, who had picked up Shaolin Soccer and Hero after the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

When you watch this film, just remember that when Hark came to America, the only movies e got to make — without much creative control — when Double Team and Knock Off, two Jean Claude Van Damme movies that co-starred Dennis Rodman and Rob Schneider.

Yes, the man who made this movie.

Sho Tanaka (Sho Kosugi), Ray Jones (Richard Wiley) and Dick Coleman (Gerry Gibson) are trying to catch drug dealers when someone betrays them. Ray is killed and Tanaka follows the leader Havlock (Lewis Van Bergen, who played the lead on the TV adaption of the comic book Jon Sable, Freelance) to Argentina.

Director Gordon Hessler made this with Kosugi after Pray for Death, which I feel is a much better and more consistent movie. This one was written by Wallace C. Bennett (The Silent Scream, The Philadelphia Experiment) and Robert Short (Scared to Death).

If this had any other actor than Sho — and his self-made weapons — it wouldn’t be as much fun. By this point in Sho’s films, he plays a cop who is just a ninja on the side versus a ninja, which feels like a step back from where he’s been. That said, he also has a throwing star that blows up on impact.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The first part of this originally ran in Drive-In Asylum. 

When American International Pictures started hyping The Incredible Melting Man, they went all out. And by all out, I mean they gave in to the sinister urge to varnish the truth. A poster for the film had this statement on it: “Rick Baker, the new master of special effects, who brought you the magic of The Exorcist and gave you the wonder of King Kong, now brings you his greatest creation, The Incredible Melting Man.”

The poster upset William Friedkin so much he tore it off someone’s wall. Sure, Baker had assisted Dick Smith on The Exorcist, but he admitted, “I really didn’t do anything creative, I just did labor” in a public apology for a publicity campaign that he had nothing to do with.

That said — Baker’s effects for the film are perfectly goopy, gory and great. He created a skull-shaped flesh-painted helmet that Alex Rebar would don, then Baker would cover him with more paint and Dick Smith’s recipe for blood — methyl paraben, corn syrup, water and powdered red and yellow food coloring (and a few ounces of Photo-Flo), ending up with such a mess that Rebar would need to peel the costume off at the end of each shooting day.

I knew none of this as I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. One day in 1977, I was simply looking at Halloween costumes in a Revco drug store at the Shenango Valley Mall. As I gazed at the various Imagineering makeup kits — like THE FACE made with FLEX-O-SKIN — I came upon a sight that would possess my every waking moment for the next several months. 

The Incredible Melting Man makeup kit.

I stood, mouth agape and frozen in fear, like how the characters in an H.P. Lovecraft story act when their mind is decimated by an elder god (or how a librarian in a Fulci movie simply sits and waits for a spider to eat his face). Then I started screaming and ran from the store. I paced outside, waiting for my parents and brother to emerge (back in the 70’s, parents would simply sit their kids in front of the toy department or magazine rack while they shopped, because we didn’t know about abductions yet). The entire ride home, I kept replaying the image of that face melting away, convinced that because I had touched the box that my own visage would soon fall apart and I’d die, a mess in the back of my parent’s stationwagon.

I had no idea that The Incredible Melting Man was a movie. All I knew was that I lived in mortal terror and my nightmare would never end.

When I finally saw the movie, I discovered that maybe I was afraid for no reason.

Directed and written by William Sachs, this was intended to be a parody of horror films but ended up being a straight scare movie and suffered as a result. It’s still a blast and Baker’s effects are pretty great.

Poor Colonel Steve West (Rebar). His mission to Saturn ended with both his fellow astronauts dead and his face and hands melted off. He spends most of the movie randomly showing up and killing couples, as well as getting his arm chopped off by an axe before suffering that most bleak of all movie big bad deaths: he’s mopped up by a janitor the next morning.

The horrifying visuals that haunted my childhood dreams aren’t nearly as frightening as I thought they would be. Years of not watching this was just wasting my time. I’m goign to mentally send young Sam a message and tell him to get that makeup kit.

Rainbeaux Smith shows up as a model and that’s usually all it takes for me to watch a movie.

I really dislike anyone who makes fun of this movie. It’s been riffed and goofed on for years, but it’s way better made than it has any right to be and is filled with some big ideas that other movies from its genre and time never would dare to include.

Shot independently around Tarrytown, New York, in 1959 under the working title The Black Door, this film finds Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) as a surgeon who just won’t accept that death is the end for his patients. And when his fiancee Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) is critically injured in a car accident that he causes, he takes her head and along with his crippled assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna), he struggles to find her a new body to transplant her still living head on.

While Jan loses her mind due to pain and the sheer oddity of being alive without a body, Dr. Bill hits the go go clubs looking for the perfect body for her. That’s one of the strangest and most delightful moments here, as instead of just any body, Dr. Bill realizes that he needs a body that best answers his sexual needs, which means he cares less about saving Jan than satisfying his repressed desires.

Throughout this story and its slowly going mad rush to tragedy, there’s a past experiment hidden behind the door. It’s played by Eddie Carmel, a 7’3″ circus performer who was known as The Jewish Giant.

This was directed and written by Joseph Green, who owned Joseph Green Pictures. It was such a tiny corporation that it had one employee, Joseph Green, and brought so many wild movies to screens like Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Monster and Two Undercover Angels, Claude Chabrol’s Pleasure Party, Something Creeping in the Dark, Death Knocks Twice and his own film, The Perils of P.K. 

I love the way this movie takes our world and instead creates its own, a place where strippers fight on stage, where camera clubs are a plot point — Sammy Petrillo is one of the dirty men taking pictures! — and old girlfriends can be wooed back just to potentially get to be the body for a new fiancee.

From Tombs of the Blind Dead to The Ghost Galleon and Night of the Seagulls — let’s not mention Curse of the Blind Dead — few images of Eurohorror are as striking as the Satanic and zombiefied Knights Templar riding out to their strange theme.

I kind of love that Spanish horror doesn’t seem to care all that much about continuity. How many ways did Waldemar Daninsky become a werewolf? Well, Amando de Ossorio tweaked the way the Knights came to be in nearly every movie, adjusting how they arrived and what they wanted, but the main idea is the same: they worshipped Satan, they were burned, they’ve come back to drink virgin blood.

As a village prepares for a festival celebrating the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Templars — what a dumb idea — the village idiot Murdo sacrifices a young girl and brings them back from the dead. Any of the romantic drama between fireworks man Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) and his Vivian (Esperanza Roy), his ex-lover and now fiancee of the town’s mayor, will have to wait until the Knights kill everyone.

De Ossorio wrote, directed and designed the Templar make-up for this. The Spanish version, El ataque de los muertos sin ojos, has more gore, like the Templars straight up devouring a human heart. That’s how you do it!

If you’re someone that complains that this movie has day for night errors and has a slow pace that seems glacial, I’m going to hate you forever. This is doom metal on film. Tune in, drop down, drink blood, smoke up.

We all have dreams but Professor Nolter’s (Donald Pleasence) is to get to the next level of evolution by crossbreeding Venus flytraps with students from his class, which seems like the worst of ideas but hey, I don’t have tenure. When he’s done with them, he sells them as freaks to Mr. Lynch (a pre-Dr. Who Tom Baker) who has quite the collection in his sideshow, including real acts Willie “Popeye” Ingram, “Pretzel Boy” Hugh Baily, Félix Duarte the frog boy, Alligator Girl Esther Blackmon and Wild Wild West star Michael Dunn.

Jack Cardiff was mostly known for his work as a cinematogapher but as a directed he was nominated for Best Director for 1960s Sons and Lovers and also made Girl On a Motorcycle. Here, he combines strange time lapse sequences, stop motion, interesting practical effects and a fantastic color scheme to great effect, taking what could be a one-note rehash of Freaks and making something if not good then definitely interesting.

Brad Harris, the star of this movie, mostly worked in Italian movies, such as playing Capt. Tom Rowland in the Kommisar X series, as well as appearing as King Augeias in Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules. Former Penthouse Pet Julie Ege was in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Finally, Jill Haworth was in Tower of Evil and the TV movie freakout Home for the Holidays.

I don’t know how many words I can write that don’t all just add up to a very simple statement: This is not for me.

But who is it for? At once it’s either the best-looking fan movie ever made or the cheapest appearing studio reboot of an existing property.

I grew up liking The Munsters just fine, but in a world where The Addams Family existed, it always felt schmaltzy and silly by comparison, like something some non-monster-loving suits concocted in a conference room versus something sarcastic and even thought-provoking. Think about it — what pop culture couple loves and supports one another as fully and perfect as Gomez and Morticia?

One of the creators, Allan Burns, even said, “We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons. Because Universal owned the Frankenstein character and the Dracula character for movie rights, they decided to take their characters instead of the characters we had written.”

Also — it was produced by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who wrote nearly every episode of Amos ‘n Andy, so…yeah.

It took four pilots to get the original Munsters right, but the show lasted seventy episodes, as well as several movies like Munster, Go Home!, a cartoon and even some attempted reboots. There was even a 2012 series planned entitled Mockingbird Lane that would have been a dark take on the story and a 2017 Seth Myers-produced series that went nowhere.

Then came the news that Rob Zombie, a lifelong fan of the television series, would direct and write a remake. Zombie had wanted to make this movie for decades and had constantly included references to the show in his songs.

Then there were some teaser trailers and the internet lost his mind, either defending Zombie’s vision or taking a Cleveland steamer all over it.

The cast looks right. I mean, let’s start with the positives. Jeff Daniel Phillips has the right Herman Munster visuals, but his voice seems a bit off. Daniel Roebuck feels strange at first as Grandpa but it works. And well, Sheri Moon Zombie was playing Lily Munster no matter what.

This is also an origin story, showing how Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Brake) and Floop (Jorge Garcia) create Herman, how he becomes a rock star and how Lily falls for him, all while Grandpa spars with Zoya Krupp (Catherine Schell).

If you loved the show, well, perhaps you will be happy that nearly every character shows up, like Lester the Werewolf, Uncle Gilbert the merman, Zombo, the Tin Can Man (that’s Butch Patrick in the suit) and even Pat Priest’s voice on the Transylvania Airlines plane. And hey, for those that enjoy Zombie always getting great cameos, Cassandra Peterson shows up not as Elvira and Dee Wallace’s voice is in here too. And oh yeah — former Cinderella drummer Fred Koury as a raven.

Zombie shot this in a super heightened neon color scheme instead of the black and white from the show, saying “I noticed when the actors were in their makeup and they were just walking around, getting lunch or whatever, they looked like cartoon characters come to life. They were just so insanely colorful. I had to light the movie in the same fashion. It really seemed at all times like a live action cartoon, which was really exciting.” You could compare it to Creepshow‘s shock moments but when stretched across an entire movie, it might burn your eyes if you can even finish watching this.

Some of the jokes are beyond unfunny, like Herman yelling “Car 54, where are you?” which is not meta and merely blah. The one moment that hit me — thanks to Voices from the Balcony for calling it out — was Lily’s date with Orlock being a Type O Negative song. Actually, my wife had it right when she said, “I’d rather watch a movie about this vampire than any of these goofballs.”

The big problem is once the fan service and fun of seeing updates of all the characters wears off, there’s no story at all, hardly an antagonist and no real reason for anything to happen. Time stands still and people mug for the camera and eventually get to the house from the series and then, when you get to where you’d want to see what happens next, the movie ends.

I’ve long said I’ve not enjoyed Zombie’s films, but I loved his first two, House of 100 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Since then, it feels like he’s been treading water. This movie shows that when he doesn’t have the crutches of gore, grime, bleakness and non-stop swearing he doesn’t know what to do next. This is also the second time he’s taken an existing franchise and taken you on a journey you didn’t need to go on to see things you had no interest in seeing.

I really wanted to be proved wrong here and Zombie to pull off an entertaining reimagining of a property he’s loved his entire life and proving to me why it’s so essential. Instead, this is a banal, cheap-looking waste of time and energy that I watched three times in the hopes that I’d find something, anything to love and utterly failing at every turn.

But maybe you might like it.