Also known as Monster of the Deep and Hydra, this movie is somehow from 1985 with a very 1955 concept: an American bomber drops a bomb into the ocean to keep it out of Russian hands and releases an ancient prehistoric monster. That beast destroys the ship of Captain Pedro Fontán (Timothy Bottoms) and his first mate Lemaris (Jared Martin), who refuses to tell anyone of the monster and cost Pedro his ship. While all that drama is happening, Margaret Roberts (Taryn Power) watches her friend Jill (Carole James) get eaten by the sea serpent and goes insane, but Pedro believes her and decides to break her loose because, well, look who am I to try and tell director and writer Amando de Ossorio how to make a movie? Oh, I didn’t to ruin the secret, I mean Gregory Greens.

Ray Milland also plays a marine biologist, Jack Taylor shows up because it’s a Spanish horror movie and then everyone just lets the Nessie swim off like no harm no foul. But hey — this has a giant water warm with big eyes headbutting a helicopter and if that doesn’t make you smile, I have no real clue what will. You know how you will know that de Ossorio directed this? The monster screams every time it appears.

Director Leon Klimovsky shows up and somewhere along the line, you realize this is more Jaws than Godzilla. It’s so ridiculous that you can’t help but love it. I mean, most of the monster footage is a hand puppet. That’s pretty great.

It might be a surprise to some of you that Tubi has a remake of Terror Train on their streaming service. Well, double that because they’re already released the sequel just a few months after their 2022 remake.

Director Philippe Gagnon and writers Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin have returned for what happens one year after the first film, as Alana (Robyn Alomar) and the Magician (Tim Rozon), as well as several other survivors have been talked into boarding the Terror Train one more time on New Year’s Eve and riding it into another dark night. Certainly the new WiFi and improved security will stop another killer from wiping everyone out again, right?

We wouldn’t have a movie if things went right.

Alana has struggled with PTSD over the past year, which has nearly derailed her medical school studies, yet her new best friend Claudia (Nia Roam) has helped her to piece things back together. It’s her idea to kill off the old year and start new on the same train which has damaged her friend so much, yet she may not have Alana’s best interests in mind. Speaking of her mind, Alana keeps seeing visions of her lost friend Mitchy (Emma Elle Paterson) nearly everywhere she goes, which causes major issues when the murder starts all over again, as she can’t be certain of her reality any longer. The same trauma impacts the Magician, who barely survived being stabbed multiple times and has found that he can barely perform and is only on the train at the insistence of Prez (Dakota Jamal Wellman), another survivor piecing his life back together and using this night to get past the, well, past.

There’s also a whole cadre of murder-obsessed mean girl social media influencers, like Pet (Romy Weltman), Morbid Merry (Tori Barban) and Lucy (Lisa Truong) who get off on being on the actual true crime train. The film hits the right notes way more often than the first film, as the exploration of returning back to the train feels like exploitation but it leans in and makes the more troubled — and yet saner — characters question why they’re really here while the clout chasers have no idea that they’re in danger. Hopefully new conductor Sadie (Nadine Bhabha) can erase the stigma of Carnie — the SPOILER WARNING — conductor killer of the first film in this remake cycle.

This has just as many twists as the remake but somehow, I liked this even more. Maybe it’s because the lizard mask is back instead of just keeping the killer as a clown. Maybe it’s just that I love surprises and seeing this show up was one of those. Or perhaps I just love slashers, with a Letterboxd list of nearly 750 of them to show for it. Either way — I think you’ll find something to like here. I could do without the CGI blood, but here’s hoping for practical gore in the inevitable third remake sequel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This first appeared on September 24, 2019.

Is there a more striking visual in horror than the Blind Dead, freshly awakened from their centuries of slumber, slowly plodding their way toward their victims? Not for my peseta. Well, they don’t make those any longer. Let me rephrase: not for my euro.

Night of the Seagulls (La Noche de las Gaviotas) is the fourth and final Blind Dead film, a series which began with 1972’s Tombs of the Blind Dead and continued with 1973’s Return of the Blind Dead and 1974’s The Ghost Galleon. Like those films, this was also written and directed by Amando de Ossorio.

Ossorio would lament the fact that these films’ budgets meant the final product could never live up to the vision inside his head. The end of The Ghost Galleon,  where a boat in a bathtub is supposed to be the Knights’ dreaded ship set ablaze, is prime evidence of this.

His iconic Templar Knights would later appear in two other Spanish horror films, Jess Franco’s film Mansion of the Living Dead and Paul Naschy’s The Devil’s Cross. These aren’t official sequels, but homages.

PS – If you catch this movie and think, “I saw a movie called Don’t Go Out at Night, or was that Night of the Death Cult, and that seemed a lot like this one,” you’re not crazy. Those are some of the wild alternate titles for this movie.

Night of the Seagulls shares the same Templars we’ve come to know, love and perhaps fear while not sharing continuity with any of the previous films.

Back in medieval times, we watch a young couple get attacked by the still human Knights Templar, who kills the man and sacrifice one of the women to their unspeakable god.

Centuries later, Doctor Henry Stein and his wife Joan come to the same town, where they’re shunned by the locals. Seriously — Joan can’t even buy apples at the only store in town without some attitude.

The reason why is that it’s Templar season. Yes, every seven years, the Templars rise and demand a virgin sacrifice for seven consecutive nights. Of course these outsiders are going to screw it all up for the town by trying to save one of the girls. Luckily — or unluckily — a village idiot attempts to aid them in their question, but all he’s really good at is being struck and thrown down hillsides.

While not on any of the official video nasty lists, this movie — under the title Don’t Go Out at Night — was listed on Greater Manchester Police’s original list of titles that were worth seizing. It took over a minute worth of cuts to enable this to be released again in 1987, but the Anchor Bay 2005 release was uncut.

Your enjoyment of this film will depend on how much you buy into the Templars, who appear to a haunting theme and then slowly make their way down the beach to expose a virgin and then do away with her. Some people find this movie slow and boring. We’re not in that camp.

Director, writer and musician Chris Alexander has taken what most remember from the Blind Dead films — synth-driven slow motion moments of a gorgeous woman being chased through the Spanish countryside by undead Knights Templar — and turned it into forty minutes of fright for Betty (Ali Chappell) who runs through the Canadian countryside in an attempt to avoid a Knight played by Thea Munster.

Imagine if Amando de Ossorio loaned out his creatures to Jess Rollin while allowing Jess Franco to shoot the Sapphic flashback scene of our heroine. As a nice addition for Eurohorror fans, Lone Fleming   (Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Blind Dead, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) is the voice that speaks over the film.

This isn’t a movie that I’d recommend to people who haven’t fallen in love with the Blind Dead or European horror where there’s no attempt at all in creating a story, just a mood that endlessly loops into your brain. This isn’t perfect but it gets the idea right. I’d love to see more of what Alexander can do in this definitely acquired taste of a genre.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Erotic Nights of the Blind Dead and El Retorno de los Templarios, this shot on video homage to the work of Amando de Ossorio can’t live up to the master but it tries with more screams and more sleaze than even he would try. I mean, the main story is about Miranda being assaulted by her father — in lurid detail, mind you — and her brother Jorge trying to rescue her and failing. Then, the Blind Dead, who once killed witches and were in turn killed by villagers, rise and attempt to destroy her as well. It takes hours and hours to get there, even slower than the slowest of de Ossorio’s slow motion.

Director Vick Campbell also made Black Roses Symphony and The Gravedigger. I’ve also heard that this is British — by way of saying he’s Polish — director Roman Nowicki. Or maybe he’s Vick Gomez. If this was a better movie, I’d delve into who or what he is, but I honestly struggled to get through this and I absolutely love the Blind Dead.

Eurohorror works because it’s trash but also it has some strange level of class to it. I can’t really explain. Sure, there is whipping and nudity and depravity but there’s also the look of things being shot on film and having some actual erotic charge to them. You need more than just to linger on the Templars, as well. You need a reason for them to be there. This is formless.

Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) owns a store in Greenwich Village but she’s really a witch and even with all her magic she’s still bored with life and wonders what it would be like with new neighbor Shep Henderson (James Stewart). On Christmas Eve, Shep finds Gillian’s aunt Queenie (Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein) in his house and before he kicks her out, she hexes his phone, which forces him to visit Gillian’s apartment to use her phone. Their evening ends up at the Zodiac Club, where Shep brings his fiancee Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule) and Queenie shows up with Gillian and her brother Nicky Holroyd (Jack Lemmon), a bongo playing warlock. It turns out that Gillian and Merle have hated one another since college, so what better payback than to work with her cat familiar Pyewacket to cast a love spell on Shep.

Meanwhile, Nicky wants to get rich exposing the world of witchcraft to Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), the publisher of Magic In Mexico. Gillian and Nicky fight over this as well as her wanting to renounce magic when she falls in love with Shep. Yet because she is a witch and she initially got with him to spite her old enemy, she decides to tell the truth even if her chance at love will be gone. Or will it?

Directed by Richard Quine and written by Daniel Taradash from the play by John Van Druten, this was released as a blockbuster and was such a big movie that it was lifted by Bewitched creator Sol Saks, who took some of this and a little bit of I Married a Witch to make his show. It almost became a series in 1976 with Yvette Mimieux as Gillian, Michael Murphy as Shep, Doris Roberts as Aunt Enid and John Pleshette as Nicky.

The title is a reference to exorcism, which is way before anyone would know what that was.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve featured these amazing Cannon movies before, but Kino Lorber has put out an incredible box set of blu ray discs featuring newly remastered in 4K and 2K versions of each film., as well as audio commentary for Missing in Action with director Joseph Zito, moderated by filmmaker Michael Felsher; an interview with Missing In Action screenwriter James Bruner; new commentary of Missing In Action 2 by director Lance Hool, moderated by historian/filmmaker Daniel Kremer; new commentary for Braddock: Missing In Action by action film historians Mike Leeder and Arne Venema; and trailers for all three movies. You can buy the box set from Kino Lorber or each film individually: Missing In Action, Missing In Action 2 and Braddock: Missing In Action.

Missing In Action (1984): Once upon a time, the story goes that James Cameron wrote a treatment for Rambo: First Blood Part II and everyone in Hollywood wanted to make it. The people that wanted to make it the most were our beloved friends at Cannon, who somehow rushed this out two months before Stallone’s character returned to rescue the POWs still left behind.

Cannon may have not been at the level of working with a star of Stallone’s calibre — and pricetag — as of yet, but they would be.

As for star Chuck Norris, he was approached to make the film by Lance Hool and the idea of making a movie that redeemed American soldiers in Vietnam spoke to him, as his brother Wieland died during the conflict. “Vietnam was a tragic mistake. If you don’t want to win the battle, don’t get involved,” said Norris.

Hool and Norris took the project to Cannon Films, who liked the project, and seeing as how they already had a similar script in development, they signed Norris to be in not one, but two movies. Except that the movie intended to be the first movie, the Hool-directed version, ended up being the prequel, released under the confusing title of Missing in Action 2: The Beginning.

But man, talk about stacking the deck. The film that was the sequel that became the first movie — welcome to the world of Cannon — was directed by Joseph Zito, who mastered the slasher genre between The Prowler and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter before making this as well as the perhaps even better — or wilder — Invasion U.S.A. and Red Scorpion.

This movie is everything Cannon in one film, outside of hiring someone like John Cassavetes to direct it or Norman Mailer to write it.

Colonel James Braddock (Norris) is a US military officer who spent seven long years in a North Vietnamese POW camp — if you want to see that, watch Missing in Action 2: The Beginning — a place that he somehow escaped a decade ago. Against the objections of Senator Maxwell Porter, he joins a government team that has come to meet Vietnamese officials in Ho Chi Minh City about the existence of still-living American POWs.

I love that Braddock has no time for the normal action hero cliches of romance. When he’s invited by Ann Fitzgerald (Lenore Kasdorf, Amityville Dollhouse) up to her room for a nightcap, she feigns mock indignation as he strips down, thinking that she’s about to get some of that sweet Chuck Norris karate directly below her belt. She turns and sees him dressed in full black commando gear, ready to climb out her window and start doing some work.

In order to get the dirt he needs on General Vinh (Ernie Ortega) and General Tran (James Hong, always a welcome actor in any movie), he must go into Thailand and recruit his old buddy Jack “Tuck” Tucker (M. Emmet Walsh), who has become the king of the black market. Then, Chuck does what Chuck does, including blowing up more of the Phillippines than ten other movies shot there and the famous moment when Chuck rises from the water holding a M60 machine gun and blowing gigantic holes in nearly everyone.

“One of the biggest thrills of my life came when I went to a theatre to see Missing in Action, and all the people stood up and applauded at the end. That’s when my character brings some POWs he’s just rescued to a conference in Saigon, where the politicians are saying there aren’t any more prisoners of war,” said Chuck. And you know, more than thirty years later, as I watch this movie on my couch, I shouted in pure joy out loud and I’m pretty much so left wing that I’ve become right and then left again.

Such is the magic that is Chuck Norris.

Missing In Action 2: The Beginning (1985): Only with Cannon can you have the sequel be the prequel when it was supposed to be the first movie. The Joseph Zito-made Missing In Action was considered to be the better of the two movies, so this one was turned into the second movie, but everything worked out pretty OK.

This was directed by Lance Hool, who sold the script to Chuck Norris, who was looking for a movie to pay tribute to his brother Wieland, who had died in Vietnam. They took the script to Cannon, who had a Vietnam POW movie in development, so that’s how we got two movies so quickly. Also, I’m amazed that Vietnam movies were impossible to make in Hollywood before Stallone and Norris changed everything.

Years before he freed US POWs in the first film, Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris was tortured in a North Vietnamese POW by Colonel Yin (Soon-Teck Oh, who was also in Good Guys Wear Black). He and his fellow soldiers have been forced to grow opium and if they want to be released, Braddock has to confess to war crimes. I mean, it’s Chuck Norris. Do you think he’s going to do that?

Yet that’s exactly what Captain David Nester (Steven Williams, X from The X-Files) believes should happen and he’s joined the side of the enemy as they subject the Americans to torture like guns being shoved in their faces and fired with no bullets. Then, after a fight that Braddock beats Nestor in, he gets a live rat dropped in a bag covering his face while they tell him that his wife thinks he’s dead and has remarried.

That’s also not a fake rat.

Then, to add even more pain, Braddock exchanges an admission of guilt to Yin’s charges of war crimes in order to get medicine for Franklin, a soldier with malaria. Yin overdoses the soldier with opium and burns him in front of Braddock, who escapes from the camp and — as you can imagine — murders every single other soldier, which includes pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka.

This came out three months after the first movie but still made $11 million at the box office.

For more info on all three Missing In Action movies, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about Missing In Action 2: The Beginning here.

Braddock: Missing In Action 3 (1988): Directed by Chuck’s brother Aaron and this time, Norris is Colonel James Braddock all over again, but we’ve discovered that his wife Lin Tan Cang (Miki Kim) isn’t dead, a fact that Reverend Polanski (Yehuda Efroni, Cannon utility fielder) imparts his way. And there’s another surprise. He has a 12-year-old son, Van Tan Cang (Roland Harrah III).

Don’t get used to having a wife Braddock.

Before you can say “Cannon pictures,” Vietnamese General Quoc (Aki Aleong) kills Lin and has his soldiers take Braddock and Van to be tortured.

The real co-star of this movie is Chuck’s Heckler & Koch G3 with grenade launcher and shooting bayonet. While Chuck used to base his movies on Reader’s Digest, this time he was looking to 20/20 for material.

This was supposed to be directed by Joe Zito, then Jack Smight, but after all the creative differences, it all worked out with Aaron. Chuck told reporters that “It’s probably the best movie I’ve ever done.”

Sadly, a Philipines Air Force helicopter used in this film crashed into Manila Bay, an accident that killed four soldiers and wounded five other people on the same day that the verdict from Twilight Zone: The Movie case was delivered in Los Angeles Superior Court.

This may not live up to the first two films, but it’s still pretty entertaining. Sadly, Cannon was in so much financial trouble that they couldn’t even afford to publicize it, which nearly caused Norris to sue the company.

For more info on all three Missing In Action movies, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about this film, click here.