A Latin teacher named Valentín Mosquera (José María Seoane) wanders through the night, stalking the  streets of Madrid and trying to come to terms with the fact that his son Mario will be executed at dawn.  This is an indictment of the death penalty as well as the debut of director Amando de Ossorio, this was filmed in secret and never released to theaters. This was seven years before Luis García Berlanga’s El Verdugo caused a major controversy at the Venice Mostra Film Festival.

Based on a play by Horacio Ruiz de la Fuente, this first played at the Belgian Experimental Film Festival and Ossorio said of it, “It was banned, they didn’t give us permission to shoot it. But we stubbornly did it.” It was made because he convinced law student Francisco Javier Pérez de Rada y Díaz Rubín, son of the Marquises of Zabalegui, to finance the filming.

It’s unlike anything else in his filmography, as after this he soon moved from human terror to the supernatural.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tino (Ángel Luis Nolías) is an orphan who lives with his uncle Quico (Xan Das Bolas) and works as a shepherd, but one night everything goes wrong. His dog gets killed by a car and his sheep are stolen by a circus who wants to use them for tiger food, so he decides to run away to America.

Based on a story by José Antonio de la Iglesia, this was directed and written by Amando de Ossorio and would be followed up the same year by his first entry into horror, Fangs of the Living Dead. He also worked in other genres than just slow motion Knights Templar whipping and killing women, including the westerns La tumba del pistolero and Hudson River Massacre, as well as the crime movie Las alimañas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wanted to have a New Year’s movie to end 2022, but how many times can I repost New Year’s Evil and Bloody New Year? This one which was originally posted on October 24, 2019.

Filmed in Banff, Alberta and using the Canadian tax shelter rules that have produced so many of our favorite films, Ghostkeeper rises above its unstable finances and near-unseen theatrical run to become a fun piece of somewhat forgotten slasher fun.

This one is all about the Wendigo, even if it spells the monster’s name Windigo. It’s a monster that lives off human flesh and is one of Canada’s few unique monsters, but the movie doesn’t spend all that much time discussing it.

Basically — if you wanted another snowmobile slasher after The Chill Factor, here it is.

Jenny, Marty, and Chrissy spend New Year’s Eve in the Rocky Mountains but end up seeking shelter from a blizzard in an abandoned hotel. There’s an older woman who claims to live there with her two sons.

Of course, one of the sons named Danny ends up drowning Chrissy, slitting her throat and putting her in a freezer. That’s also where the Wendigo lives in the body of her other son.

By the end, Jenny has shotgun blasted the old woman and assumed her mantle of the Ghostkeeper, which takes hours to happen and plenty of darkness to wade through. But the end is really effective, so if you have the patience to take it this far, the movie is totally going to reward you.

The music for this comes from Paul Zaza, who also composed music for My Bloody Valentine, Curtains and Prom Night. In fact, most of the music in that Jamie Lee Curtis disco dancing slasher was recycled from this film.

I just want someone to explain to me why the UK VHS of this movie has a mutant chicken rising from an Incan temple under the hot sun. Because…I kind of want to watch that movie, too.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or order it from RoninFlix.

Teresa (Susana Estrada) is an exotic dancer who leaves her work to go back to her small town fpr the funeral of her father. Once there, she meets Miguel (Emilio Álvarez), the younger brother she never watched grow up — as she escaped to the big city — and falls in lust with him. He feels the same attraction, yet wants the simpler life of marrying Marisol (María Rey).

A Spanish sex movie about a small fishing village and an incestual love. Hmm. Sounds like Jess Franco, hmm? Nope. This was made by Amando de Ossorio. It’s not as sexy or as strange as you want it, but you know, once you’ve seen this done ala Jess, it’s kind of hard to live up to it. It’s nice that de Ossorio stretched out and tried something new, but I kind of like when he’s killing people in the jungle or the Spanish countryside in slow motion with synth doom blasting over all the carnage.

When two bandits steal gems and other valuable pieces of fine art from a museum in the Dominican Republic, they don’t even get a moment to moment to celebrate their ill-gained treasures. Instead, their American partner Todd (Paul Benson) who is hiding at the home of his girlfriend Margaret (Rosa Valenti) and her girlfriend Jacqueline (Verónica Miriel). Oh yeah — they also have an alligator in the back so if he needs to disposes of any bodies to keep all those stolen museum relics, he has them.

Directed and written by Amando de Ossorio, this has little of his trademark slow motion or supernatural moments, but is really about the horror that man can visit on other men. Or women on men. Or alligators on humans. You know what I mean.

Shot in Madrid, the Dominican Republic and Miami, as well as a museum in Santo Domingo, this is a movie that ends with every single person paying the price for their crime. It’s a dark film, which is the one thing that ties it to the rest of de Ossorio’s work. It’s not easy to find, but hey — I am always, if anything, a completist.

How do we deal with trauma, when the true unknown of the universe, the inky black nothingness that can erase those we love from existence, comes into our little world? If you’re young Agatha Black (Bridie Marie Corbett) you discover the scary story and sound effects records that you father once used to listen to with you and become obsessed with them, even if the truth they begin to tell you reveals your dark fate in a world that wants to take you from the only home you’ve ever known and a once safe neighborhood now surrounded by masked killers. With each revolution, these records take Agatha further from our reality and begin to infect everyone in her orbit.

Bradley Steele Harding, the director and writer of this film, is someone that I often write to when I find a microbudget movie that obsesses me, as I know that he’s as fascinated by them as I am. The highest praise that I can give his film is that if he hadn’t made it, it would be one that I would excitedly write up and send his way. I always wonder why people don’t take inspiration from true low budget strangeness like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death or Messiah of Evil — two movies this definitely pays tribute to — instead of just making another generic slasher. Harding goes me one better on this by taking his budget and using it right: it doesn’t cost anything to set the camera up in a way that makes every single shot terrifying and off-kilter. The money spent goes to the right things, such as Udo Keir for the opening voiceover and great artists for the sound design and album covers themselves.

Agatha feels as fragile and haunted as any giallo heroine yet while the movie plays with that genre somewhat, it is slavish to no set formula, instead becoming very much its own film. It has moments that may remind you that this is Harding’s first film, but seeing some of the brushstrokes only serves to make this painting that much more intriguing, a genuinely odd and wonderful film that we surely need more of.

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also buy this movie on blu ray from Amazon and learn more on the official Facebook page.

Lucia (Paloma Valdés) is a wild and free girl who leaves her old life to study to be a nurse and become friends with Cristina (Carlota Avendaño) and Gloria (Manolita Barroso). See, knowing Spanish helps, as this title means School of Nurses.

How does she get in this school? Well, Lucia has run from her billionaire father at the airport because she feels like staying in Madrid. It works, but then she’s hit by a car and nursed back to health by a doctor named Ramón (Carlos Larrañaga). He feels that she needs to get away from her father and start her own life, so he offers her the chance to become a nurse.

This looks like the same quality as a Mexican film from the same era and feels much like an American teen film. What’s surprising is that it was an early film by Amando de Ossorio just as he was finding his way as a director and writer.

Tubi is all over this sequel to their movies thing, now with this second installment of The Stepmother. Directed by Chris Stokes (House Party 4, You Got Served) and co-written with Marques Houston, this movie again finds the stepmother  (Erica Menda, Love & Hip Hop New York) moving on to enter and murder her next family. Now she’s both Elizabeth Carter and Diana Valdez and if you think she died at the end of the last movie, well…

Now she has the family of Kevin Smith (Daniel Johnson) in her claws, but when his ex-wife Judi (Janet Smith) and best friend and former cop Chris Harris (Wesley Jonathan) get suspicious, Kevin starts to worry if this is the right woman to raise his son Dustin (LaVell Thompson Jr.). All the same, our stepmother is starting to lose it even more, seeing Frank from the last movie everywhere she goes.

They set up a sequel in this — oh man, can I avoid ever sequels or Tubi? — and the cops are as effective as the ones in any giallo. So of course, I watched this and yelled at the screen the entire time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Remember Girls Getaway Gone Wrong? Well, Parker (Brittany S. Hall), Bailey (Tanisha Long) and Simone (Crystal-Lee Naomi) are back, this time at New York Fashion Week. When Parker loses her lead model for her show, Simone volunteers to step in and Bailey offers to be her accountant. And oh yeah, there’s an assistant named Johnny (Kalonjee Gallimore) but no matter what, everyone always gets in trouble. Parker gets in a fight with another designer Dalia (Gabrielle McClinton) who claims to be working for a famous designer named Cairo (Brenda Braxton), but her designs look a lot like Parker’s, so tea — as the kids say — gets spilled and then Dalia goes missing and Parker is the main suspect.

Things get worse, as Cairo is found dead and Parker’s boyfriend Steven (Marcus Anderson Jr.) gets arrested. Still, Parker signs a contract with fashion CEO Andre Sessex (Kenneth Israel) but then Dalia reappears to warn her of danger right before her show.

That’s not the end of this story but do you really want me to give it away for you? If you liked the first one, well…this is a very Lifetime caper movie for you to enjoy for free. I won’t judge.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Beth Waldron for suggesting this movie. This was originally posted on March 27, 2022. This is also a New Year’s movie!

The Apartment is astounding because it makes me consider how we view actors based on where we arrive in reality. For me, Fred McMurray is the kind Steve Douglas from TV’s My Three Sons. For those born before 1960, they probably saw him on that show and wondered how the heel from Double Indemnity and The Caine Mutiny could be trusted around three growing children.

In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, he’s Jeff Sheldrake, a man who uses everyone he meets, like lonely C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon) for his apartment and Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) for her body, uncaring when he pushes both of their to the pit of depression and even a suicide attempt by Fran.

Bud is willing to let the rest of the world see him as the villain, as every executive — Ray Walston is one of them  — uses his home to have dalliances with his secret lovers while he drinks in bars, dreaming of taking home a married woman when all he really wants is the kind of secure love that allows you to sit happily on the couch next to one another and play cards.

There’s also a genuine sadness at the heart of this movie, as Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond based the film on reality, as high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger’s wife Joan Bennett. Lang had used a low-level employee’s apartment for the affair, just like the film. Diamond also contributed something that had happened to a friend, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to discover that she had committed suicide in his bed.

Back to McMurray. After this was released, women yelled at him in the street, complaining that he had made a filthy movie. One even hit him with her purse. I guess that was the Twitter of 1960.

This may be the best awarded movie we’ve talked about on this site, as it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Best Film Editing at the 1960 Oscars. Jack Lemmon may not have won Best Actor, but when Kevin Spacey won that award in 1999 for American Beauty, he dedicated his Oscar to him, as Sam Mendes had the cast watch this movie for inspiration.

Since then, The Apartment has been remade as a musical (Promises, Promises, which played in 1972 and was revived in 2010) and as two Bollywood movies, Raaste Kaa Patthar and Life in a… Metro.

The amazing thing is that 62 years after this movie was made, it reduced me to tears. It pulled me in and made me care about every single character, even the villain, and the closing scene — and that last line! — absolutely devastated me.

You can get The Apartment from Kino Lorber either on blu ray or 4K UHD. You’ll also get two different audio commentary tracks, one by Joseph McBride, author of Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge and the other by film historian Bruce Block. There’s also a documentary about the making of the film and another about the art of Jack Lemmon, plus a trailer.