I had no idea that Brian Dorton directed and wrote a remake of Nick Millard’s Criminally Insane. One could argue that Millard did the same with his sequel, as it uses so much footage from the original movie. Yet this time, we get more of the story of Ethel (Dixie Gers) as she annihilates everyone that gets in her way.

Ethel may have killed her Uncle Joe, which is why she’s been in a sanitarium all these years, but when two orderlies assault her, she’s released and in the care of her Aunt Joyce. Yet she eats so much food that her guardian must lock it away, which drives her to the brink and beyond, and before you know it, Aunt Joyce is dead too.

Made with real animal guts, this movie in no way shies away from the gore. There aren’t many movies that have a death by inserting a smashed wine bottle into someone’s nether regions, much less a POV anilingus shot.

Yet beyond all the sleaze and guts, this movie has a great performance by Gers. You actually understand Ethel a bit more by the end and if anything, feel for her plight if not understand it.

You can get this from MVD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey, Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he contributes to Drive-In Asylum. His first article, “Grindhouse Memories Across the U.S.A.,” was published in issue #23. He’s also written “I Was a Teenage Drive-in Projectionist” and “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover” for upcoming issues.

Unlike the Louis Armstrong song featured in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, “We Have All the Time in the World,” I’ve been thinking about how little time we really have in this life. I’ve been around long enough to have lived in a generation with no cable TV, pay TV, VHS, DVDs, or streaming, where we watched genre films in grindhouses, at midnight screenings, and on broadcast TV shows such as The CBS Late Movie and Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater. Few of those films featured senior citizens, and if they did, the older timer was usually a psycho-lunatic, like Neville Brand in Eatea Alive. Today, however, things have turned, and it’s in vogue to feature senior citizens in genre films—and to show them having sex. See X from director Ti West, for example.

Until the film I’m about to review here, the best exploitation film featuring the elderly—and how shabbily society treats them—was Bubba Ho-Tep, Don Coscarelli’s imaginative, funny, and ultimately sad, meditation on what it’s like to grow old. (George Romero’s elder-abuse public service film, The Amusement Park, was years away from rediscovery.) I think though, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, equals, if not betters, Coscarelli’s cult gem, which had Elvis and JFK, at the end of their lives, fighting a reanimated mummy.

Reading the title of writer/co-producer/director Robert D. Krzykowski’s film, going in, I didn’t know what to expect. You have “killed,” “Hitler,” and “Bigfoot.” Gotta be trashy exploitation, right? But it’s The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, with the pretentious-sounding definite article “the” before Bigfoot, raising a parallel to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Is it a hybrid high- and low-brow film? I’m happy to report that it is—and strides both the arthouse and grindhouse perfectly.

America’s wonderfully grizzled character actor Sam Elliott, with a look and voice for the ages, in a performance for the ages, is Calvin Barr, a World War II veteran who lives by himself in a small town. He has his dog and a mysterious trunk under his bed. He leads a simple, reclusive life. About the only person he regularly talks to is his brother, Ed, the town barber, in a nice performance by comedian Larry Miller. Calvin’s life is winding down until the day two government agents, one from the U.S.A, played by Ron Livingston (credited as “Flag Pin”) the other, a Canadian, played by Rizwan Manji (billed as “Maple Leaf”), knock on his door. They know about Calvin’s hidden past. During the war, he had killed Adolph Hitler during a secret mission, a mission which is classified, so no one will ever know that Calvin is a hero.

Flag Pin and Maple Leaf implore Calvin to go on another dangerous mission. You see, Bigfoot in the Canadian Pacific Northwest is sick with a virus that could potentially wipe out mankind. (Man, this movie was sure prescient about the pandemic! Calvin’s immune to the disease (don’t ask for the particulars, just go with the flow), so they want him to kill the Bigfoot and save the world.

And, thus, we get to the heart of this beautiful film. What is your legacy? Are you a hero if no one ever knows of your heroic actions? What is the price of being a hero? (You can guess that there’s a sad flashback about a lost wartime love.) And finally, can you find meaningful closure to your life while up against the Grim Reaper? The film asks you to ponder these questions, and by the end, you’ll be thinking about them for a long time. I know I have.

But lest you think the film is what Joe Bob Briggs would describe as a “lobster,” a pretentious arthouse film, let me assure you it delivers with some highly entertaining, gory exploitation action featuring the horribly diseased Bigfoot. As I said, it straddles that line between art and exploitation perfectly.

I loved The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. It’s a film that’s so conceptually weird that it couldn’t possibly be good. But it is, just like Bubba Ho-Tep. As an aside, you’ll note that brilliant indie writer/director John Sayles and legendary special effects artist Douglas Trumbull are credited as executive producers, with Trumbull doing the special effects. They obviously had faith in Robert D. Krzykowski’s vision, and when you see the film, you will too. I hope he creates more oddball gems in the future. His first feature is amazing, a cult film waiting to be discovered.

Directed by Daniel Benedict (Bunni), who co-wrote the script with Casi Clark (they also worked on a short called Fall of Grayskull), The Bloody Man is an attempt to bring back the warm and gushy feelings of 80s horror. It stars Tuesday Knight (Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) and Lisa Wilcox (Alice Johnson in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child) to help you make that connection.

After the death of his mother, Sam (David Daniel) is having issues with his family, his friends, the bullies at his school, and most of all, the horrific Bloody Man, the comic book character that sustains him through bullying. In fact, his mother (Wilcox) gave him a Bloody Man action figure the very day she died in a car accident.

He also has to deal with Kim (Knight), his new stepmother, who he believes is slowly becoming possessed by his comic book antihero, an event that brings together his fractured family.

Between lengthy comic book animatics and plotting that keeps reminding us that Sam is being bullied at home and in school more than several times, the film drags at times. The closing — where the Bloody Man begins to imitate others — has some good tension, but it takes around two hours (!) to get there. That said, it’s fun seeing all the 80s toys and AEW/ROH wrestler Brian Cage as a copyright skirting He-Man character in a brief cameo (probably pulled from the aforementioned Fall of Grayskull short).

The Hold Steady may have sung, “I’ve survived the 80’s one time already and I don’t recall it all that fondly,” but it seems that so many films want to live in the past — trust me, I get it, slashers after 1983 are really hard for me to hold in any regard — versus moving toward the future. And the more you make a teen horror film with synth and blue/red gel lighting — well, at least on the poster — the more you’re going to get compared to Stranger Things than The Monster Squad.

That said — I did like The Lost Boys reference by calling the brothers Sam and Michael. With some pruning toward how much is in here, this would be a fine feature. As it is now, it’s not bad, but it does drag a bit before redeeming itself with a fun conclusion.

The Bloody Man is available on digital and VOD platforms as well as on DVD and blu ray — which comes with director’s commentary, bloopers, behind the scenes, trailers and promo videos and collector’s edition packaging with illustrated slipcover and a folded poster. You can get those from MVD.

Thanks to Wild Eye for featuring our review on the back of the box!

Two former astronauts alongside a conspiracy theorist who discover the hidden truth about Earth’s moon.

The secret of the moon.

Yes, I said it.

I’ve also said that this is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen and just imagine, I’ve seen 118 Jess Franco movies and 46 Bruno Mattei films and therefore have to come some kind of degree in stupid.

Jocinda “Jo” Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) were once in NASA together and a space shuttle mission they were on barely made it home when the moon — yes, the moon, let me reiterate this to drum up excitement for the moon’s big hidden lie — attacks them. No one believes him, so he’s disgraced while she moves up to be NASA’s deputy director.

Brian is reduced to dealing with his unruly son, his ex-wife and K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), the only other person in the world that believes that the moon is evil.

The moon is evil.

Brian also learns that he was made to look like a tin foil hat wearer because NASA has been covering up the moon all the way back to the first moon landing, even creating a device to destroy whatever lives inside the hollow moon — which is even better than hollow Earth or flat Earth, yes? — but budgets got too high and instead of maybe not sending hundreds of billions to neo-Nazis fighting our Communist enemies and trust me, no one is right and everyone is horrible and that’s my political stance they just canceled the one thing that could save the Earth.

I’m going to save you the trouble of watching this and reveal the secret of the moon.

The secret of the moon!

The moon is a Dyson sphere — a megastructure that completely encompasses a white dwarf star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output — to become a starship. Billions of years ago, humanity’s technologically advanced ancestors were eradicated by a rogue AI — ancient aliens! — and basically sent the moon out to create all life on Earth but the evil AI followed. It just took a few million years to get back and start killing our planet.

Can we save the Earth? Of course.

Is a cat named Fuzz Aldrin? Yes.

Did this cost more than any independent movie ever? You know it.

Emmerich has talked about filming two sequels back-to-back and Bradley said that “If Roland goes down the direction that he wants to,  the sequels would be even more batshit crazy than the first.” Emmerich said, “I’m also not very high on sequels. But I tried this time to make this a trilogy, but I am not sure even if I want it anymore. I think if I do a sequel, I will make it a little bit more like the original Star Wars, the second one will have a huge cliffhanger. Because that’s totally lost on people.

This failed on a monumental level but man, I want those sequels to happen.

Donald Sutherland also totally is in this for two minutes as if it’s an 80s movie made in Italy.

Andrew Marton was an expert at big movies, doing second unit on Ben Hur and Cleopatra. He directed this — from a script by Juliet Zimet and Jon Manchip White — in which some of the dumbest scientists ever screw everything up for everyone.

Project Inner Space in Tanganyika, Africa is the stupidest think tank ever. I mean, I get blowing up the moon, but testing Earth’s geothermal energy by drilling a very deep hole and dumping nukes down it? What did you think was going to happen? Well, just look at the title of this movie.

Two doctors are fighting over this idea: Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) thinks everything will be fine. Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore) believes that, yes, this will put a crack in the world. Sorenson is dying from cancer, so I kind of think he’s rolling the dice.

The science in this is laugh-inspiring, as somehow a new moon can be launched into space and everyone is like, “Now it’s all fine. Look, a squirrel survived!”

Dana Andrews made eight movies in 1965. His son had died the year before and he was struggling with alcoholism, but man, somehow he still made eight movies. He’s also mentioned in “Science Fiction Double Feature” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, along with his co-star Janette Scott.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Produced by John Russo and intended to be a sequel to his 30th anniversary remix of Night of the Living Dead, this had a screenplay written by Karen Lee Wolf, the daughter of executive producer Joseph Wolf.

There’s some back and forth about why this movie turned out the way it did. Director Tor Ramsey said it was rough with both Russo and Wolf telling him to use their friends as crew members. Ramsey even sent an apology to Homepage of the Dead and said, “As for Russo, I was surprised to find him not quite the idiot internet sites make him out to be and certainly doesn’t derve to be fed to one of his own zombies as the prevailing winds usually concur. . He’s basically a decent guy who should be allowed nowhere near a movie set. Sadly I must confess his reputation as a hack is well deserved. He insisted I use his DP, a 63 year old farmer named Bill Hinzman who played the cemetery zombie in the original Night. Bill’s previous work was unwatchable garbage like FleshEater and Santa Claws and though the Wolf’s knew Hinzman’s work, they told me I had to use him anyway due to Russo. I also had to use Russo’s pal Bob Michelucci as my Art Director though he had never set foot on a movie set and his experience was limited to doing sets for a softcore porno mag called Scream Queens.” The rest of his rebuttal is scathing and man, this movie sounded like a nightmare.

Russo claimed that Joseph Wolf liked his script and was going to direct it before showing him his daughter’s work, which he said was horrible. He refers to this movie as The Living Abomination of Children.

As for Tom Savini, who acted and coordinated the stunts, he said that this was “the biggest piece-of-shit movie ever made. I think her father gave her that movie as a present and she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. The film shouldn’t even be on the shelves of video stores.” He also had all of his lines dubbed.

The story is about fourteen years after a zombie attack in a small Pennsylvania town — more on that in a bit — Matthew Michaels (Damien Luvara) is trying to open a car dealership. He doesn’t realize that he’s on the land where Abbott Hayes (A. Barrett Worland) has control of the living dead. Also: Abbott Hayes appears to be wearing a latex Nosferantu mask.

This movie also combines the two split living dead timelines with the first outbreak taking place in 1969 — Night of the Living Dead — and the second outbreak in 1986 — Return of the Living Dead — for the first and only time. Hey — where’s Rev. John Hicks from Russo’s remix? Why even do that if you’re not going to follow it up?

The most amazing thing is that this was shot where I get off the turnpike to go visit my mom, literally minutes away from where I grew up, right down from the wild Ann’s Thrift Shop where I got a DVD of El Topo for $2 and a beta of House On the Edge of the Park for 25 cents. Some of the action takes part in the parking lot of Danny’s Motel, some at Valhalla and because this is a busy road where the turnpiek cuts through, no traffic is stopped as zombies battle humans. You can also see the bookstore that screams ADULT under the old Holiday Inn where they found an old man drowned in the pool and he was in there for weeks and was bright white when they fished him out, but back to ADULT — called Human Beings I think now — it still smells like PineSol forever and we’d go there to get nitrous and one dude was too cheap to get a cracker for them and froze and broke out his teeth in the back of my van while I was driving. You can see Sims Bowling Alley and people going in to bowl in the middle of this undead battle but the best thing is that the other place that humans fight off flesheaters in now DJ’s Island — visit the web site and be amazed — the premiere tri-state area lifestyle club since 2002. Yes, DJ’s Island provides a safe, sexy and fun filled upscale nightclub atmosphere for like-minded members to enjoy and the amenities include an elegant carving station every club night, featuring chef selection, soup, salad and one alternate item. This is in my home town. My home town is Twin Peaks without the logging to make up for the mills closing. This section is techncially Beaver Falls, but really, it’s Big Beaver and if you don’t think a swinger club in a town called Big Beaver isn’t hilarious, you really aren’t on my level.

Based on a book by John Russo, this was directed by Steven Fierberg and had a script by Jeffrey Delman (Stuck On You!, Deadtime Stories), Thomas Rendon and Evan Dunsky (the creator of Nurse Jackie). It has Tony Todd as Makoute, an evil voodoo priest transforming his workforce into zombies. I mean, it’s cheaper than a health plan.

Gina Gershon plays one of his employees and man, she has some great stories to tell. For example, before this movie, she had just gotten back from New Orleans where she said she met a weird voodoo girl” and came home to a black cat just as the script came. With some reflection, she said that’s not the best way to choose a movie. She also claims that one of the producers didn’t want any chanting in the movie, saying “I don’t want any of that voodoo shit in here.” She asked him why the movie was called Voodoo Dawn.

This also has Raymond St. Jacques, who became the first black actor on a TV series when he was on Rawhide. There’s also Theresa Merritt from The Wiz, the recently deceased Kirk Bailey who was Kevin “Ug” Lee on Salute Your Shorts and Gloria Reuben from ER.

This is much closer to the pre-Romero zombies of White Zombie, so go in with that mindset. And keep in mind that this is not the 1998 Voodoo Dawn which has Roseanna Arquette and Michael Madsen.

At one point, there were double-digit drive-ins in the greater Pittsburgh area. Today, we’re lucky to still have The Comet, The Brownsville Drive-In, The RiversidDrive-InIn Theatre and, as always, The Dependable, now playing first-run movies and friendly to families after decades of being literally a pit of lust and sin. Sigh.

In 1987, Tom Ferrante (who also worked on the music for Raiders of the Living Dead) directed and wrote this film and not only was he able to get James Karen to narrate it, he got a who’s who of horror at the time, everyone from Bobbie Breese and Linnea Quigley to Forest J. Ackerman, George Romero, John Russo, Tom Savini, Russell Streiner and Sam Sherman all talking about the days of drive-ins as well as their horror careers, intercut with trailers for Terror Is a Man, The Blood Drinkers, Theatre of Death, Brides of Blood, Girls for Rent and clips for Nurse Sherri, Blazing Stewardresses, Night of the Living Dead, Don’t Open the Window, The Green Slime, Satan’s Sadists, Ghoulies, The Human Duplicators, Horror of the Blood Monsters, Assignment Terror, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Psychos In Love and From Beyond.

There’s a moment where you get to hear Russo and Romero discuss There’s Always Vanilla, which if you’re a Pittsburgh movie fan is worth watching this whole thing for.

Once, I was looking for a drive-in in White Oak that had a swimming pool and you could swim under the screen and pick what movie you wanted to watch, as a different one was shown on each side. An older gentleman noticed me wandering and asked what I was looking for. When I told him, he laughed and said, “You’re standing on it. This parking lot is where it used to be.”

The past is gone and further back in the rear view every day. All we can do is try to capture it today, write about it and keep those warm memories. As a wise man has said — and will say — many times, “The drive-in will never die.”

Directed by Morgan J. Freeman (American Psycho 2) and written by Katie L. Fetting, Jake Goldberger and Frank Hannah, this Pittsburgh-filmed movie features scenes at Shady Side Academy, North Allegheny High School, a community center in Midway and a farm in Bell Township. It starts strong with Mischa Barton driving and crying and just running right through someone.

She plays Shelby, who has just inherited a bowling alley when her mother dies and can barely pay for it. Her old boyfriend Mike (Matt Long) is coming home as they’re retiring his jersey and he’s brought his new girlfriend Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup) with him but as far as Shelby cares, Mike still loves her. Yet Shelby pulls that move where she befriends her enemy and starts to lead her down some dark — and drunken — paths.

That’s when this movie goes back to the beginning and we learn that Shelby has cosplayed Misery, using a car to do the damage, and has taken Elizabeth captive inside her house. Well, she does double Misery by slicing her Achille’s tendons to pieces later. This would be kind of fun if the movie leaned into the obsessive ex genre and make it over the top and fun, but it never gets there or goes there.

Homecoming is smart enough for a Pittsburgh-shot film to use Bingo O’Malley but doesn’t get the area at all, as at one point, Shelby pours Mike an iced tea. He’d just have a carton or jug of Turners if this was a legitimate Pittsburgh movie that truly understands the liquid landscape of our town.

It seems hard to think about it today, but in the 1990s through 2000s, zombies weren’t interesting to Hollywood. Then 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead were surprise hits and Fox, was trying to buy the name Night of the Living Dead and decided to talk to George Romero, who wanted to make a movie he called Dead Reckoning. Universal Pictures ended up giving him more money than he ever had for a film and he decided to make everything he didn’t get to do in Day of the Dead.

There are some fun moments here — Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright cameo as zombies thanks to their Romero lovefest Shaun of the Dead, Savini’s Blades character from Dawn of the Dead has a few moments of being awesome, I’m always happy to see Asia Argento and I like the idea of the zombies using tools and becoming evolved after Day — but the fact that this is set in Pittsburgh yet shot in Canada has made me kind of upset.

The reason for my anger? It’s because this entire movie is based around the city and has Fiddler’s Green, an area for the rich and powerful ruled by Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), being protected by two of the three rivers as well as Dead Reckoning, a battle truck co-commanded by Riley Denbo (Simon Baker) and Cholo DeMore (John Leguizamo).

If you aren’t from Pittsburgh, the name Kaufman is amusing because the fancy department store down was Kaufmann’s and was always used to my childhood as an example of being rich. “Did you buy that suit from Kaufmann’s?” people used to say.

As for Argento, she plays Slack, a fighter in the gladiator pits where humans and zombies battle for the entertainment of the powerful elite. There’s also a zombie called Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) who has learned how to plan, lead and use tools.

I realize it’s not the worst zombie film — it’s not even the worst Romero Zombie film — but it feels like a movie standing it place, treading water and reliving its past, which is pretty much what the zombies do as they attack Fiddler’s Green.