EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on May 8, 2020. MVD has just released it on blu ray with a high definition (1080p) presentation of the main feature in 1.85:1 aspect ratio. You also get the original trailer, reversible artwork and limited edition slipcover. Order it from MVD.

Rich Correll was Richard Rickover on Leave It to Beaver and helped Harold Lloyd preserve his film as a teen, a role he still works on. He’s directed tons of TV, like a hundred episodes of Hanna Montana. He also produced the Police Squad! TV series and worked with Police Academy‘s Paul Maslansky to make this somewhat forgotten 1990 teen comedy.

Ray Walston and Martin Mull are the grown-up good and bad guys in this story of a ski lodge being sold to make a mall, because in 1990 malls and avarice were things, not that they aren’t things right now.

George Lopez and Paul Feig — yes, the very same man who would make Freaks and Geeks and less famously, the 2016 Ghostbusters  — make early appearances.

This was released the same year as Ski School, which got a sequel, while this movie had none of its planned follow-ups.

There’s a wacky guy who has multiple faces thanks to a mask that allows him to continually talk to himself. That’s pretty much the highlight of this film. I’d like to say that these are a genre in and out of themselves, but seeing as how this is posted during a week of Police Academy ripoffs, I can tell you that they are basically beach movies, which are the same thing as Porky’s movies, which are the same thing as Meatballs ripoffs, which are also all really Animal House ripoffs.

I still watch every single one of them.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on the site on March 1, 2018.

Cauldron Films has released this before, but this is a reissue without slipcover of their astounding looking release of Fulci’s gangster masterpiece. Along with a 4K restoration from the original negative, this has new interviews with writer Giorgio Mariuzzo, actress Ivana Monti and actor Saverio Marconi; archival Interviews with actors Fabrizio Jovine and Venantino Venantini, cinematographer Sergio Salvati and composer Fabio Frizzi; new commentary by film historians Troy Howarth, Nathaniel Thompson and Bruce Holecheck; an image gallery; trailers and a reversible cover with alternate artwork. You can get it from MVD.

Imagine Fulci making a cop movie. Imagine that the budget ran out two weeks in. Imagine that real mobsters paid for the film, asking for a title change and for more violence (like Fulci was going to say no). Don’t imagine. All of these things are wonderfully true and make Contraband such a weird addition to your Fulci collection.

Luca Di Angelo smuggles near Naples with his brother Mickey. They have a close call with the police and suspect a rival gangster, Scherino, of turning them in. After sharing their concerns with their boss Perlante, one of Mickey’s prize horses is killed and a fake police roadblock leads to Fulci paying homage (or straight up ripping off, depending on your perspective) to the scene where Sonny dies in The Godfather. Luca escapes death while his brother is not so lucky. Despite warnings that he should leave town, he has a speedboat funeral for his brother and vows revenge. Breaking into Scherino’s house, he almost kills the man before running into his henchmen. He gets his ass kicked, but his life is spared after the boss tells him he had no part in the death of his brother.

Adele, Luca’s wife, wants him to forget this life. But he’s in deep after discovering that a vicious French criminal named The Marsigliese is responsible. We meet this criminal during a drug deal, where he responds to a bad batch of heroin by burning a woman’s face with a blowtorch. If you haven’t realized that you are watching a Lucio Fulci movie, this would be the point in the film where you realize that fact.

The Marsigliese starts killing all of the Mafia leaders so that he can become the sole boss of Naples. Even Perlante is nearly killed, only being saved by the fact that his chief capo was having sex with his mistress and triggered a bomb under the bed. After a meeting between Luca, Perlante and The Marsigliese, where they discuss working together, Luca warns his fellow smugglers that if the French boss has his way, there will be more drugs, more overdoses and more problems — with less money for all of them.

The police are using all of the intercine battling to round up smugglers, but Scherino saves Luca and suggests they work together. They meet at Perlante’s house, but Luca smells The Marsigliese’s cologne. That’s when gunmen bust in and shoot everyone but Luca, who escapes by crashing through a window. Scherino is mortally wounded, but not before shooting Perlante in the neck, killing him.

Again, in case you wonder who directed this film, The Marsigliese kidnaps Adele and demands Luca turn over his smuggling operation over the phone…and then plays him the sounds of our hero’s wife being beaten and gang-raped. Luca unites all of the retired mob bosses and old guard bosses, who are sick of hearing about the Frenchman taking over. They take out most of his men and Luca guns him down in a garbage-strewn alley in a scene packed with blood spraying everywhere.

Adele and rescued and Morrone, the leader of the old school mob guys, tells the police that he has no idea who Luca is.

Contraband was made as Fulci was starting to claim his gore crown. It’s his only crime movie, but it’s not a bad effort. And if you’re looking for his trademark tics, as you’ve read above, this film is full of them. It has way more blood and guts than any film of this type and subverts the genre it should be in, so it’s quite similar to how Fulci treated sword and sorcery with Conquest. This may not be one of his best-known films, but it’s worth checking out.

In Spain, this was known as Una gota de sangre para morir amando (A Drop of Blood to Die Loving), in France as Le bal du vaudou (The Voodoo Ball), in the U.S. as To Love, Perhaps to Die and in the UK as Clockwork Terror and Murder In a Blue World.

It’s director and co-screenwriter Eloy de la Iglesia’s take on a future world that at times may feel very 1973 but also feels way more 2022 than we may want to admit.

The director was a member of the Spanish Communist Party and his films reflect his beliefs, bravely work in his feelings on his homosexuality and often feature violent forms of social protest, all of which caused him massive issues as he battled the censors of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Anna Vernia (Sue Lyon) is a dedicated nurse, dating Dr. Victor Sender (Victor Sorel), a doctor who uses electro-shock therapy on violent criminals to make them better citizens. This is necessary, so he believes, as they live in a city constantly dealing with crime, including what the police believe is a sadistic homosexual man killing gorgeous young men.

As a family settles in for the evening and plans to watch A Clockwork Orange — look, if you’re going to be ripping off or making your own version of a movie, go all in! — they’re soon attacked by a motorcycle gang who assault the mother and father, finally killing them before leaving their son alive. One member of the gang, David (Chris Mitchum), disagrees with the other members, so they attack him and expel him.

Meanwhile, Anna is collecting pop art — Alex Raymond original art, a copy of Lolita which is ironic as Lyon played the lead in Kubrick’s film — when she isn’t acting as that serial killer everyone is looking for, using a scalpel to murder men after sex, becoming inspired to murder by their post-coital heartbeats. David sees her disposing of one of her bodies and begins following her as she disguises herself and wipes out an underwear model and a young gay man.

David has befriended her guard dog and makes his way into her home, blackmailing her and using the money to buy a motorcycle. His old gang attacks him and leaves him for dead, which takes him to the hospital, where Victor plans on using his techniques to redeem him. Anna decides that this can’t happen — she feels something for him — so she kills him after reading Poe to him as her would-be lover Victor’s patients lose their minds.

I love how this movie somehow combines the ancient future of the 70s with the trapping of giallo. This is a strange and wonderful film that I plan on going back to several times.

The Cauldron Films release of Murder In a Blue World has a 2K restoration of the Spanish producer’s cut from the negative in a 1080p presentation. It has a newly edited interview with Mitchum, a dubbing feature, a video essay by Dr. Xavier Aldana Reyes and commentary by Kat Ellinger. You can get this from MVD.

Directed and written by Thomas J. Churchill, Amityville Uprising is the story of an explosion at a military base, acid rain and zombies being created as a result, all of which are endured by police officers Dash (Scott C. Roe), Howie (Tank Jones), Nina (Kelly Lynn Reiter) Lance (Mike Ferguson) and Malloy (Troy Fromin). There’s also Dash’s son Jimmy (Kole Benfield), infamous criminal Joe Gallo (Micah Fitzgerald) and the news crew there to interview him.

Churchill also made The Amityville Moon and Amityville Harvest, making this the third Amityville movie that Churchill has made for Lionsgate, which kind of shocks me that they’d get into the Amityville game. Yet here we are, a third movie that has little to nothing to do with the Amityville house and is instead set there. There’s only one moment, when a prescription bottle has the 112 Ocean Avenue address on it, that has a reference to the original film.

This is very Assault on Precinct 13 but nowhere near the magic of Carpenter’s film. But that’s the idea. And you know, it’s almost shot too well for an Amityville film, having some actual quality and color balancing, things I don’t expect from this subgenre.

What it doesn’t have is the bizarre ideas that so many of the lower budget Amityville movies do have, instead being content to make a cops versus zombies film with cut in news footage that goes from bad to worse, so fake by comparison that it breaks the narrative. The blast that starts all of this also looks quite poor in contrast to the good special effects for the undead segments, as if there are parts of this movie at war with one another.

The first half of this is more about the breakfast orders of a bunch of cops, which I kind of admire, as there’s so much effort given to the ordering and delivery of a series of sandwiches and breakfast foods. I wish I had some breakfast right now thinking of this film, which is something I have never said about any other Amityville movie.

This does mention events from the other two movies, so I appreciate that there’s a goal of creating a shared universe. I want this so badly. I want someone to connect the Amityville stories in space, in the hood, with clowns and theaters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Internet movie criticism is filled with people rushing to champion subpar movies into something beyond what they are while well-made films like What Josiah Saw remain unchampioned.

Directed by Vincent Grashaw and written by Robert Alan Dilts, this Southern gothic is a dark journey into the pain within one family. As the Graham clan — Eli (Nick Stahl), Thomas (Scott Haze) and Mary (Kelli Garner), forever under the shadow of their father Josiah (Robert Patrick) reunite at their remote farmhouse, they must finally face up to the secrets and sins of the past.

In the first chapter, we meet Josiah and Thomas as they fight to keep the family farm from being bought out despite it being haunted by the ghost of Josiah’s wife who hung herself. Josiah ends this segment by, well no easy way to say it, but making his son masturbate his demons out in front of him before telling him that the family must reckon with their sins.

In the second part, Eli must pay a debt to a crime lord by being part of stealing gold from a gypsy-led carnival, which leads to a reading of his future that claims that he’ll die soon before all hell breaks loose. The tense moments in this are near-overwhelming.

Then, Mary and her husband Ross (a near-anonymous Tony Hale from Arrested Development) have a tense dinner part where their need to have children is discussed. She’s had a trauma in her past and had her tubes tied; now she wants a child. Or maybe her husband does. Or maybe they just think they do. It’s true horror, the most real of all.

You may wonder, “Where is the actual horrific horror?” I thought the very same thing until the final segment which brings the entire family together for the last time. As this film jumps from drama to crime to terror, it unites itself with a strong story and assured direction.

I was stunned by this movie and really want you to go in as unprepared for the ending as I was. That said, I want more people to be watching and experiencing this, a film I truly believe in.

Bruce Cogburn (Guy Pearce) is a writer whose book, The Infernal Machine, was a huge success that he’s never been able to follow up on. Now, an obsessed fan seeks to draw him out of hiding. However, that fan seems to not have Cogburn’s best interests at heart.

Based on “The Hilly Earth Society,” which was written by Louis Kornfeld and produced by Jonathan Mitchell for The Truth podcast, this movie was directed and written by Andrew Hunt.

Cogburn’s novel inspired Dwight (Alex Pettyfer) to kill thirteen people, which is one of the reasons why he’s never written anything else. He lives alone in a desert home, drinking himself into oblivion, but the confrontation with his past may be something that pulls him from his depressive state if it doesn’t kill him.

There’s not much more to the story beyond that, as it seems like a short stretched too far, but Pearce is astounding in this. I loved every moment he was on the screen. He’s a force in this and I hope he keeps the momentum for whatever he chooses to do next.

Directed by Mark Polonia, who has been to Amityville before with Amityville Island, Amityville Exorcism and Amityville Death House, and co-written by Polonia and Aaron Drake, this brings back Father Benna (Jeff Kirkendall) from Amityville Exorcism and begins with a final battle against the darkness within the house on 112 Ocean Avenue. The demon inside cuts off the priest’s hand and in pain, the holy man begs for God to help him. His prayers are answered as the house is blasted into not only space, but the far future.

I mean, I’m here for all of this. You know how I am about Amityville, not to mention horror sequels set in space.

The moment that I knew I would love this movie is when the space ship that finds the Amityville house floating within a black hole, we see the crew contains a robot named Vox. Said robot’s costume looks like a silver foil welding suit version of Wildfire from the Legion of Super-Heroes. That’s topped by this film’s version of the demon, which looks like a Spirit store version of a final boss from a Mortal Kombat ripoff game from 1993.

Additionally, this movie is amazing because it’s just as much sub-budget Event Horizon as it is an Amityville film and once I realized that, my heart grew 666 times.

If you can’t get into a movie being made in a small town in Pennsylvania with foil covering the windows to simulate a starship, as well as a giant priest battling an enormous demon outside of a black hole with a glowing pentagram between them, why are you even watching movies?

Also: I did some science research. This movie has its vessel doing Dark Star work sending nukes into black holes. I found the answer, of course, on Reddit. One answer said that “All that happens as a consequence of the bomb exploding is in the future light cone of the detonation event, which is all inside the black hole.”

Someone asked the same question on Quora and the answer there by Shane Kennedy was “Nothing. Even if it did explode, the energy released in a “nuke” explosion is irrelevant compared to the energy in a black hole. The chances are that it would just be torn apart without exploding.”

This answer by Hardik Prajapati gets super scientific: “Blackholes are spheres with very very high gravitational force. Even light can not escape that force. So even if the bomb explodes, we won’t be able to observe it. Blackholes are made from high density neutron star. You can’t expect a black hole to be destroyed just by an explosion of nuclear weapon.

Bomb explosion would release a huge amount of energy (assuming it reaches the “surface” of a blackhole and explodes). Blackhole treats energy and mass equally. So it will absorb all the energy released by the bomb.

Lets assume we throw the bomb at event horizon. Time is slow there, much much slower then in our normal world. So before the bomb reaches the center, we might have passed 100s or 1000s of earth years. So if you are the person to drop the bomb, you probably wouldn’t be the person to observe it when it explodes. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

Finally, this answer by Christopher Barnes says it best: “Not much. Black holes absorb nuclear explosions already – they’re called “stars.” You’d add a bit more nuclear fire and a bit more radiation to an environment that’s already fairly rich in both, to a net result of precisely dick.”

I’m not watching Mark Polonia movies for science. I’m watching them to be entertained. If a Satanic house can fly through space and take over an advanced civilization a thousand years after Earth is no more, who am I to discuss matters of physics when all I really know are shot on video and Italian ripoffs?

You can get this from MVD.