A section 3 video nasty, this movie was made by Rino Di Silvestro, who claimed that he wanted to make a serious werewolf movie. We should take the director of Deported Women of the SS Special Section at his word, I guess.
Daniella Neseri (Annik Borel, Weekend with the Babysitter, Truck Turner, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils) was assaulted when she was just a child, which has made her emotionally and sexually stunted and unable to have any relationships with men. Then she learns that she comes from a lineage of werewolf women, at which point she begins to have very involved dreams about being a wolf woman that manifest themselves when she gets all bothered watching her sister Elena (Dagmar Lassander, The House by the Cemetery, Hatchet for the Honeymoon) making sweet love to her man, so she responds by killing the dude, then throwing his body off a cliff because that’s how they did therapy in 1976.
Found near the body, Daniella is institutionalized before breaking away and continuing her murder spree before she finds love and respect — after killing a potential rapist — in the arms of Luca (Howard Ross, whose real name is Renato Rossini, and whose career stretched through nearly every genre of Italian exploitation, from Hercules Against the Mongols and The Man Called Noon to Marta, Naked Girl Killed in the Park and The Pyjama Girl Caseto The New York Ripperand Warriors of the Year 2072).
Of course, this is an Italian horror movie and there’s no way that Luca and the werewolf woman can be happy just making love on the beach. Three men break in and assault her before killing him, so she hunts them all down before the cops arrest her. To ensure that no one learns any lessons, she’s institutionalized and dies, then her dad kills herself, then her sister, who has lost everything, just lives whatever life is left after all this.
Man, I don’t know if they knew what they had with this movie, a film that shows the institutions of men failing women on every level, including the male-directed movie that tells this story. That said, a movie where a woman equates sexual desire to being a werewolf and also she maybe is a werewolf and the knowledge that I’ve spent more time considering the psychosexual implications of this movie than the people who made it? That’s why I keep writing about films like this.
Also known as Daughter of a Werewolf, Naked Werewolf Woman, She-Wolf, Terror of the She-Wolf and Legend of the Wolf Woman, this film is something else.
I really think that the better movie is the making of and what happened after this film, kind of like how WCW was actually pretty boring back in the 90s but what was happening away from the cameras was a million times more interesting. Instead of a stirring drama of a woman leaving the father of her children for a much younger rock star while dealing with a sex pest actor and alienating her leading lady which leads to frenzied drama as the cast tries to keep it normal at Cannes, we get a stilted take on The Stepford Wives at Los Alamos.
Olivia Wilde made a big jump from the sister bond gross-out humor of Booksmart to this and hey, more power to her. That movie was Superbad revisited nearly a decade later with women in the lead. Maybe that’s going to be her thing, revisionist filmmaking, but hey, it made nearly three times its budget back, so yeah, we’re totally going to see more of that. Who cares if we’ve seen it before?
That said, Florence Pugh is wonderful and will easily move past this trifle, a movie that finds her and Harry Styles as Alice and Jack Chambers, a young couple who live in the 50s neighborhood of Victory where everyone works for Frank (Chris Pine), who is making something amazing and reality-altering that can make planes fall out of the sky. Or, you know, it’s all a twist. I mean, you know it’s a twist.
Wilde plays Bunny, a neighbor married to Nick Kroll, so yes, this is somewhat science fiction. I kid, I kid. I kind of love that even in this artificial world of fantasy, Dita Von Teese is still the image of perfection no matter whether it’s on film or in our unreal life.
Anyways — this was written by Dick Van Dyke’s grandchildren Carey and Shane, then rewritten by Katie Silverman, whose last film Isn’t It Romantic is very much simulation theory as well.
I desperately wanted this to be more than it was, but damn if it doesn’t look gorgeous. And hey, any movie that pretty much has Jordan Peterson as the bad guy is a winner for me. Let’s just make a movie of all those Busby Berkeley scenes and Dita and really, I’d probably give it way more stars than this. I like the message, I get the idea, but I wish it had something more to it than a pretty update to show for all the drama that happened along the way.
Smile is everything I hate about modern horror: a plot hijacked from the 90s obsession with Westernizing J-horror, CGI blood, herky jerky cameras, an overreliance on jump cuts, interstitial drone shots and so many sins against my personal cinematic rules. Sure, I love Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Bruno Mattei, Joe D’Amato and direct to streaming Amityville movies and have no taste, but I still know a movie that has no merit whatsoever when I watch it.
A longer version of director and writer Parker Finn’s Laura Hasn’t Slept, this is totally a short stretched to feature length and all of the issues that that brings. That same Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) is a patient of Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) and she hasn’t slept since she watched her art professor kill himself after an entity hunted him through the smiles of people who proclaimed that he would die. Now she has the same issue and passes it on to our protagonist and then slitting her neck as computerized blood fills the floor. So, you know, The Ring-style curse gets passed on, strange moments of possession of people all around her, a past with a mother who died while she watched…you’ve seen it all before, but at least this one had a fun ad campaign of smiling people showing up on TV and smiling through news shows and baseball games.
Does the protagonist have a cop boyfriend still in love with her? Yes.
Does she have a curse that she has to pass on? Yes.
Does it toy with the hope of a happy ending only to pull the rug? Yes.
Derek Riggs, who created Eddie for Iron Maiden, once told me that someone smiling was the most unsettling visual. He’s right. I wish he could have also explained to these filmmakers how to make a better movie not so reliant on cliches, but then again, people have been quick to enshrine this along with other movies that really aren’t that special like It Follows and The Babadook, two very simple movies that simply aren’t anywhere near as wonderful as people hunting for something to evangelize, empty notions of film that would barely register were so many truly dreadful horror movies being made. In the kingdom of really dumb movies, slightly stupid ones have become king.
Jean Rollin had such a rough introduction to film — being chased by the forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco while making a documentary, running out of money, causing scandals, suffering an accident during the filming of La Vampire Nuewhich left him traumatized — that the fact that his movies ever came out is nothing short of a marvel.
After 1971’s Requiem for a Vampire he finally became a success, making a movie that he called a naive film, one that had a simplified story, direction and cinematography. And yet he made movies he knew would fail, like La Rose de Fer (The Iron Rose) and would work in adult films as Michel Gentil to pay the bills. Yet he would keep making absolutely deranged movies like Les démoniaques — two women are assaulted and killed by pirates and then have sex with Satan to return and get their revenge — and Lèvres de sang in which a man is obsessed with a childhood memory that could really be a dream.
He’d go between getting close to success with movies like Les raisins de la mort and then having to go back to make adult films to pay the bills. Even the artistic success of Fascination was poorly distributed meaning more Michel Gentil or Robert Xavier porn films.
In 1982, however, he made La morte vivante which may be his most commercial and successful film.
Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard) has been dead and buried in her family vault beneath the Valmont mansion before grave robbers, some dumped chemicals and a tremor awakens her. She can only live by drinking blood and fades in and out of reality — much like one of the director’s films — remembering her childhood friend Hélène (Marina Pierro) who ends up helping keep her alive. There’s also Barbara(Carina Barone), a photographer obsessed with the image of Catherine.
This movie is probably the most accessible Rollin movie. Sure, it moves at the same languid pace as his other films, but it has a story, one drenched in sadness and childhood nostalgia and perhaps even young love. It has more gore than much of his other movies and no small amount of nudity, yet the true reason this succeeds is that it’s the most potent of all strains of Eurohorror drugs. Watching Rollin is like finding out that joint has been laced and you keep waiting for the real drugs to kick in and before you know it, it’s too late and there’s nothing you can do to stop the slow creep of the high and before long you’re enveloped by it and love it but also unnerved at the very same second. By the end, that same love has destroyed everything. A woman has been set ablaze and Hélène has given of herself to Catherine’s unending need to drink blood, cracking her open like some kind of delicacy. Françoise Blanchard went so over the limit in this scene that the crew thought that she had really lost her mind.
Supposedly, there’s an English version that was shot with the same cast and crew, directed by Gregory Heller who would shoot his scene right after Rollin. It is a lost film.
Lani McCall (Joanne Jansen) is a social media chef about to get her own TV show, so she needs someone to take care of her son. That means getting a male nanny — a manny — named Morgan Washington (Michael Evans Behling). Not being used to seeing a man be sensitive and act like a father, she falls for him, but yeah, this is a Tubi movie and that means that Morgan is still a child himself looking for a family even if he has to kill to keep them.
I guess we have reached the point where men can be the hand that rocks the cradle, so it seems as if we’ve made some progress, even if it’s the fact that psychotic murderous nannies can be any gender or race.
Directed by Doug Campbell, who has 49 credits to his resume including Zapped Again! and several TV movies that end with …At 17 or start with Stalked by… as well as Deadly Garage Sale and Swim Instructor Nightmare. It was written by Tamar Halpern and Scotty Mullen, who wrote the last two Sharknado movies.
I am somewhat relieved that I don’t have the career that warrants a manny and yet maybe if I stopped watching these movies maybe I’d have more time in my life to be more successful and become a social media influencer with my own TV show.
Directed and written by JT Kris, who also made 2020’s I Think We’re Alone Now, Ghosts of Amityville shares the same cast as that film and also places Junie Liv Thomasson in the way of a killer. That movie used a synth version of the Tommy James and the Shondells song, while this one, well, it uses a clown that is the way that Thomasson’s character Olivia perceives the demon of Amityville.
This isn’t the first Amityville clown movie. There’s Amityville Clownhouse. Yet this movie has a young girl try to process the grief over the death of her mother by seeing a clown that keeps coming out of the woods in a movie that is a little over an hour or a year, give or take. It feels like we’re in those woods forever, making me never want to hike anywhere that isn’t covered by concrete or asphalt.
The idea is right and there are some great shots in here by cinematographer Isla Marshall. Seriously, there are a few dreamlike moments that work, but they’re followed by moments that don’t. But any movie that ends with an old woman driving so slow away from the killer that he’s able to basically walk up to the car and catch it while it’s in motion is pretty great. I’m still laughing way longer and harder at that than I have at any comedy I’ve seen this year.
Jackie (Natalie Peri, who is also in Amityville Conjuring) and Danny (Paul Faggione, who played John Gotti in a series of documentaries and is also in a movie called Bad Ravioli, so you can expect exactly what he does, speaking in an exaggerated Italian accent) are having Thanksgiving at an intensive therapy session with Amityville’s best — and not only, believe it or not — marriage counselor Frank Domonico (Mark C. Fullhardt, who is also in Amityville Conjuring, so…it looks like I’ll have to watch that as well). The doctor has some strange ways of bringing couples together, although it seems like he wants to have sex with Jackie more than fix her marriage.
Yes, this is both a Thanksgiving and an Amityville movie and man, that means that I was duly bound to watch it. I mean — just look at this Amityville list of films I’ve already made it through.
Directed and written by Will Collazo Jr. (Bloody Nun, Night of the Zomghouls, Ouija Encounters of the Third Kind, Mothman: Mount Misery Road and yes, the upcoming Amityville Conjuring) has kind of, sort of assembled this movie from disparate scenes and several solo actors just filmed on their phones. Seriously, the film ends way before it actually ends and people just talk about events that happened within or after the story and there’s no reason at all for them being there.
Yet you know, to make an Amityville movie about Thanksgiving and not have it really about either and instead an excuse for old men with thick New York accents about having rough sex with other men’s wives is pretty much a genius concept. It also has Shawn Phillips and David Perry as a male couple that has the same marriage issues as everyone else.
I was going to say I have no idea who this is for, but I know that the answer is me. I’m the same kind of jerk that will write thousands of words saying how creatively bereft a movie like Smile is and then watch every single Amityville movie and if sixteen year old me knew that, he would be so happy with how things turned out.
Also: marriage counselor who puts the seed of a demon into women he’s steered into leaving their husbands and then eating them — as well as killing their marriage counselor competition — is the kind of career path no one tells you about. Cannibal Marriage Counselor is also not as good a title as Amityville Thanksgiving.
The SRS Cinema DVD of Amityville Thanksgiving has a commentary by director and writer Will Collazo Jr., an interview with the lead actor, a trailer and trailers for other SRS Cinema movies. You can get this from MVD.
We’ve come to the end of season one of Tales from the Dark Side but before we close out, we have The False Prophet, a really odd episode all about Cassie Pines (Ronee Blakley, Barbara Jean in Nashville and Nancy’s mom from A Nightmare on Elm Street). Cassie has followed the advice of Madame X, a fortune telling machine, all the way from Iowa to Texas looking for her true love.
What she finds is not just a man named Heat (Justin Deas), but Horace X, another automatic fortune teller that just might be her quarter-operated lover.
Directed by Gerald Cotts (who did four episodes of this show and three episodes of Monsters) and written by Julie Selbo with the story credit to Larry Fulton, this is just a weird one, stuck inside one closed down bus station in the middle of nowhere yet packed with some off-putting menace. It doesn’t get silly or preachy, unlike so many episodes, and is content with just being odd. Well done.
What’s next after season one of Tales from the Dark Side? You’re going to have to come back next week and find out.
Shot in 1967 around Dallas, Texas, who could foresee a time when this monster movie would be re-released in England under a whole bunch of titles like E.T.N.: The Extraterrestrial Nastie, E.T.N.: The Extraterrestrial Nasty, The Extraterrestrial Nastie and The Extraterrestrial Nasty. How did people feel when they rented this and got a movie about an alligator that mutated in space?
Directed by James A. Sullivan (who also directed Fairplay, a western family comedy, and The Pickle Goes In the Middle, a gangster comedy about taking over a fast food restaurant; he also edited Manos: The Hands of Fate and Brutal Fury) and written by Russ Marker (who himself directed The Yesterday Machine and The Demon from Devil’s Lake), this is the kind of movie where people allowed their own houses to be used for the production. No one got rich, but hey, we’re talking about this movie fifty years later.
NASA experiment Operation Noah’s Ark sends a whole bunch of animals to the moon and back just to see what will happen with them. What has happened with that kind of scientific method, the kind that says, “Just shoot a monkey into space, fuck it?” Gentlemen, tonight we’re going to blow up the moon.
Fantastic Four-style cosmic rays blast the ship, which falls back to Earth and crashes in Satan’s Hollow, Texas because Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina was, well, not near Texas where this was shot. Then some college students get the bright idea to throw a party at the crash site because, well, look kids have never been smart. The kids of the sixties who want to go back to a great America were dumb enough to party where a UFO crashed and thought ducking and covering would save them when the nukes rained down.
Sheriff Clint Crawford (John Agar) and Professor Alan Clayton (Roger Ready) know there’s only one way to kill a monster: blow it the fuck up. They do. We cheer. The end.
But anyways, Brenda Venus is in this. I am certain she is not a real person. Here’s why: she’s in movies like FM, Deathsport and this, but at some point in her life, bought a book at an auction that had Henry Miller’s address in it. She wrote to him, he wrote back and became her mentor. They wrote about 1,500 letters to one another over four years.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on March 13, 2018.
After 1990: The Bronx Warriors, director Enzo G. Castellari created this film, originally entitled The New Barbarians. The title change reflects the name New Line Cinema would use when they released the film in the United States. This movie checks off nearly every box when it comes to what it’ll take to get me to love a film: it’s Italian. It’s a ripoff of Mad Max. It has George Eastman in it. It has a big name (well, in Italy) American star, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. It’s packed with enough weird quirks that would put off anyone else, but they made me fall in love with it. And oh yeah — Giovanni Frezza (Bob from House by the Cemetery) makes an appearance.
2019. No relation to 2019: After the Fall of New York. But after a nuclear war, a gang called the Templars take it upon themselves to purge the Earth of anyone left alive. The film starts by showing us just one of their attacks, as they take their modified cars and golf carts out for a spin, murdering a convoy of survivors. Normal humans might look ragtag and dirty, but the Templars wear all white battle armor and have punk rock hairdos. The gang is a real family affair, as Shadow (Ennio Girolami) is Castellari’s brother and Mako (Massimo Vanni) is their cousin. Their leader is George Eastman as One.
After murdering everyone they’ve found, One tears a Bible apart and proclaims, “Books. That’s what started the whole apocalypse!” and “The world is dead. It raped itself. But I’ll purify it with blood. No one is innocent. But only we, the Templars, are the ministers of revenge!” Needless to say, George Eastman is doing what he does best here: not only chewing the scenery but taking big bloody bites out of it.
Later, Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete, Escape from the Bronx, Black Belly of the Tarantula) finds the survivors of the attack and fends off some scavengers. He puts one man out of his misery and takes what’s left for himself. We follow him as he meets up with his mechanic — yep, little Bob — who lives in an armored ice cream van, ala the KLF. They have a little gun battle, as you do, just to show that they’re friends. Scorpion needs his gearshift fixed and the problem seems to be that there’s an ear stuck in it. Yep. You read that right.
The Templars are looking for The Signal, the radio station that shows where humanity is still alive. Any car they see, they destroy, including the modified UPS van that Alma is in. They impale the driver and drag him off while she’s saved by Scorpion after being caught and dragged by a net. Scorpion and Shadow have a war of words after our hero spares Mako.
You can’t tell me that Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard didn’t base the look of The Walking Dead character Princess on this film.
Anyways, Scorpion takes Alma to his base where he repairs her shoulder and makes sweet, sweet love to her. Against One’s commands, Mako leads a group of Templars against Scorpion, who is saved by Nadir (Williamson), an arrow wielding, well-dressed badass. No, seriously, let’s all drink in the magic that is Nadir.
While Scorpion uses a car to roll over Mako’s dead body, Nadir shoots one of his arrows directly into a Templar’s neck, blowing his body to bits. Our hero sends Mako’s body back to One as his answer to where he stands. Holy shit, when Nadir talks, saying stuff like, “I enjoyed…your little game…of war!” I lose my mind every single time.
One kills the rest of Mako’s men while studying the fallen man’s dead body. He yells, “We are the Templars. The warriors of vengeance. We are the Templars. The high priests of death. We have been chosen to make others pay for the crime of being alive. We guarantee that all humanity, accomplices and heirs of the nuclear holocaust, will be wiped out once and for all. That the seed of Man will be canceled forever from the face of the earth!” They honor Mako’s dead body, saying that they will take ten thousand lives for his and will now hate and exterminate. But only One will have vengeance on Scorpion.
Our three heroes then meet a caravan of religious people led by Moses who have found The Signal, the aforementioned radio signal which will lead its followers to the last civilization on Earth. Alma and Nadir decide to stay with the caravan. And why would Nadir leave after he finds such perfect companionship with Vinya, a girl with glittery eye makeup, a side ponytail, access to booze and who does the deep concentration service and biorhythmic concentration (but it’s been a while since she’s done it). Let me tell you — the entire scene where she and Nadir talk about the end of the world before he starts making out with her is ridiculous and nonsensical and so perfect.
However, Scorpion claims that “heaven is dead” and that “memories are worth nothing.” Man. He was emo before anyone knew what it meant. He walks in on Nadir, who has obviously just got done making love and says goodbye. The rest of the Templars find him in seconds and take him to One, who reinitiates Scorpion into the Templars by anally raping him. Yes, you read that right. All of the motorcycle helmet wearing dudes watch while hanging around on cars and bikes as One takes it to our hero. Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. He gets interrupted by a scout who tells them they’ve found the caravan and that they need to finish off Scorpion while he goes off and murders everyone else.
Luckily, Nadir gets to Scorpion just in time. Not as luckily, doing so means that the caravan gets easily overtaken. He then yells at our hero, “Here lies the great Scorpion, in pain, victim of the big, bad queers, the Templars! All you had to do was ask. Nadir, I need your help. You’re not so great now, Scorpion.” But don’t worry. One training montage later and the mechanic kid — let’s call him little Bob, as that’s what I always call Giovanni Frezza in any movie — and our heroes are back to save everyone.
One smokes some weed while listening to a tape that says, “If you could win the sky, if you could win the sky, I, this evening would have possessed the world. But I don’t want to stain my name with ridicule. Fighting against the world of endless sky. Yet, I feel that soon, I too shall breach the supreme barrier.” What? What the fuck is he listening to! The dude is just totally smoking up while everyone else is out there killing humanity!
This leads to One giving another amazing speech: “Idiots! Dreamers! Don’t you understand? The world is dead! We have all closed our eyes! Even the heavens are silent! You! And you! And you! You are walking dead! Walking corpses! There is nothing left! Nothing. Not even The Signal you think you hear. Nothing. There’s no more soul. There’s no more hope. There’s only one faith. One ecstasy. Death! And death you shall have, you last ugly dregs of humanity! You don’t deserve to live!” A car filled with dead bodies shows up and interrupts, but they realize too late…it’s a trap! Scorpion, Nadir and Bob are here to kill as many Templars as possible and save the day.
One and Scorpion have a stare down. It’s obvious that beyond the rape earlier that these guys were lovers at one point. They have to be for this much pent up hatred. One gets off the first shot, but Scorpion has on clear body armor under his cape. You have to see this shit to believe it!
Meanwhile, Shadow starts taking out people one by one, killing Moses and Wiz. But Scorpion blows him away as Nadir takes out the rest of the Templars. There’s even a scene where Bob saves Nadir, leading to a high five. Then, Scorpion tracks down One before he runs away and impales him in the ass with a drill before blowing his car up.
The survivors gather. Nadir’s woman lived. So did Alma. And one would imagine that they’ll look for The Signal, but that’s it. Scorpion and Bob hold hands as Claudio Simonetti’s synth score blares. All hail Warriors of the Wasteland!Or The New Barbarians!
I wish that Enzo G. Castellari had made ten of these movies. This is exactly why I watch movies — to be entertained, to yell at the screen, to jump up and down in glee. Exploding arrows, heads flying off, cars with domes and saw blades that hack off human heads — this one has it all! Throw in “The Hammer” as a bad ass who could pretty much carry his own movie — he’s honestly way more entertaining than the lead — and you have a winner.
Seriously — with the idea of a religious group versus an evil gay biker army, this movie seems like a Jack Chick tract come to life. Yes, after the fall of man and the rapture, only a radio signal will lead us all to heaven, that is, if you can avoid all the rapes and murder. It goes without saying that this movie has no interest in being politically correct. The fact that it has no real animals were murdered makes it as woke as Italian cinema gets.
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