EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on June 7, 2022 but is back as this film has been released on blu ray by Kino Lorber. It features a new interview with special makeup effects artist Robert Short and an audio commentary by action film historians Brandon Bentley and Mike Leeder, as well as a theatrical trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

A samurai named Yoshimitsu (Hiroshi Fujioka, the original Kamen Rider) is overwhelmed in battle and falls into a frozen lake where he freezes over the decades before skiier find his body. Soon, Dr. Richard (John Calvin) forgoes the traditional autopsy and revives the swordsman with some blue lights and introduces him to a modern world he can’t come close to understanding even with the help of an Asian studies expert named Chris Welles (Janet Julian, Humongous). Then one night, a janitor breaks in and tries to steal the thawed Japanese swordsman’s katana and gets sliced in half, sending Yoshimitsu on the run (but not before listening to watching the WASP footage of them performing “Tormentor” from The Dungeonmaster).

He wanders Los Angeles, saves an old vet (Charles Lampkin) from a street gang and getting into no small manner of trouble. Unlike so many frozen out of time movies, things in no way go smoothly or end happily.

Also known as Swordkill, this shot in Richmond, Virginia film was one I’ve been trying to find for some time. It was co-produced by Arthur Band, who must have had a calming influence on Charles for this one (Richard did the music making this a Band family effort).

It was directed by J. Larry Carroll, who edited Roar, Dracula’s Dog, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Massacre at Central High and The Hills Have Eyes before writing Tourist Trap and tons of cartoons, as well as directing only this one movie, which was written by Tim Curnan, who also wrote the wonderful Forbidden World.

It’s 81 minutes long which is exactly how long this movie should be, never staying past its welcome and filled with exciting swordplay and no small amount of sadness.

Like nearly every other genre director in the Old Country, Amando De Ossorio had a possession movie in him and if their films feel purer than their American counterparts, it may be because they’re all true believers, raised in countries that had way more religion in their blood than the freer — and yet often more repressed — New World.

Our titular demon witch child is possessed by a witch named Mother Gautère (Kali Hansa) who starts this movie off by destroying a church, stealing a chalice and killing herself in the name of Satan by jumping out of a police station window rather than revealing where the baby she’s kidnapped is, telling the forces of law and order that the child would be dead by the time they found it. Meanwhile, young Susan (Marián Salgado), the daughter of head inspector Barnes (Angel del Pozo) is given a pendant that instantly begins her possession. Avoid all gifts from hippies as you would tanis root from old Hollywood actors.

Perhaps she can be saved by Father Juan (Julian Mateos), the priest who left behind love and condemned a good woman to a broken heart and a life on the streets? Or maybe the maid Anne (Lone Fleming) can get through to her. Well, no on either account and young Susan neatly slices off the penis of Anne’s lover and presents it to her in a napkin, along with crawling the walls like a prepubescent Dracula.

What strange coincidence that when The Exorcist came to Spain, Salgado was the voice of Linda Blair.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back in 1910, native sorcerers stole a woman and attempted to sacrifice a woman under the full moon, but not before whipping her because this is Eurohorror, but soldiers stop them before they can chop her head off. However, a demon has possessed the woman, so the bad guys — are they the bad guys, this is colonialism against indigenous people? — win.

Many years later, Professor Jonathan Grant (Jack Taylor, who else) leads a safari investigating where all the elephants in West Africa have gone, bringing along two white blonde women (of course) named Elisabeth (Maria Kosti, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse) and Carol (Loli Tovar, The Legend of Blood Castle),  as well as Tunika (Kali Hansa, Demon Witch Child) and the studly Rod Carter (Simón Andreu). They soon find where the natives we saw earlier conducted their occult rites and Carol decides that this would be a good place to take photos and then they all make the worse decision to camp there.

That woman that was nearly killed and possessed before, you know, Bárbara Rey from The Ghost Galleon? She’s been waiting for something just like this and can bring back the old sorcerers and they all chop off Carol’s head. I mean, they whip her first, but you knew that, right?

Now she goes from headless rich girl photographer to leopard skin-wearing vampire and soon, she and the original vampire woman are killing everyone, including Liz, who was dumb enough to take sleeping pills in the middle of all this insanity. Day for night slow motion leopard print insanity, mind you.

Sacrificial rites turn normal women into leopard vampires. There aren’t enough kind words to say about this, one of the many wonderful movies in the Nightmare Theater package.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Originally released as Seeds of Sin with unconnected sex scenes inside the film, Andy Milligan succeeds at something that only Juan López Moctezuma can come close to: non-stop screaming.

Everybody in this movie hates themselves, hates one another and hates anyone that comes in between one another. Even the camera hates everyone, swirling out of the way to avoid whatever is happening on screen at times. Christmas has brought the Manning family together one last time and someone is killing them one by one, but it feels like a mercy killing as originally fake smiles give way to teeth bared and always the yelling, always the anger, always the screaming.

Peter and Jessica, the live-in help, also want to kill mom.

Maggie Rogers is Claris the mother, confined to a wheelchair, drinking herself to death, burning the money instead of heating her house, lording over a family that includes son Michael and daughter Carol forever sexually intertwined even when he’s abusing his wife Susan, sex-obsessed priest son Matthew, daughter Margaret who is dating a tough guy and Buster, the military school brat who is obsessed with the Third Reich and his lover Drew while also being abused by Matthew.

Everyone in this movie has an issue, several of them more than one, and they all drag one another into a festering abyss of tortured life and painful death. Acid to the face, knife to the heart, electrocuted in the bathtub.

I can’t even imagine what this film’s distributors must have thought when they got it and wondered, “Who wants to endure this?” Me! That’s who. Instead, they stuffed it with faceless people having anonymous sex as if that would erase the psychological barrage that you just witnessed. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to get down after watching this and if they are, they just might eat your head after they’re done with you.

A holiday movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This voyage of the Blind Dead originally ran on our site on December 13, 2020.

What shall we call this movie? The Blind Dead 3? Horror of the Zombies? Ship of Zombies? Or The Ghost Ship of the Swimming Corpses? Let’s just go with The Ghost Galleon and know that it’s the third Blind Dead movie after Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Blind Dead.

Writer and director Amando de Ossorio is back, again pitting the former Knights Templar, now zombie horde against some swimsuit models and the rescue party that comes to get them. Now, they have the power to appear within the fog, taking over the ocean and killing all that they come near.

Jack Taylor, who worked with Jess Franco often, shows up here. He was in everything from Mexican films like Nostradamus and the Monster Demolisher to The Vampires Night Orgy and Pieces.

This movie is like being in a trance. A trance that has a flaming ship in a bathtub for a special effect, which is perhaps one of the finest trances to find oneself. The Blind Dead themselves are wonderful as always, but the idea that a sporting goods store owner could get publicity by stranding models and then somehow a galleon filled with the graves of Knights Templar who sacrificed women to Satan find them and take them inside their fog world and…ah, why am I complaining? That’s actually a perfectly logical plot.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on September 24, 2022.

From Tombs of the Blind Dead to The Ghost Galleon and Night of the Seagulls — let’s not mention Curse of the Blind Dead — few images of Eurohorror are as striking as the Satanic and zombiefied Knights Templar riding out to their strange theme.

I kind of love that Spanish horror doesn’t seem to care all that much about continuity. How many ways did Waldemar Daninsky become a werewolf? Well, Amando de Ossorio tweaked the way the Knights came to be in nearly every movie, adjusting how they arrived and what they wanted, but the main idea is the same: they worshipped Satan, they were burned, they’ve come back to drink virgin blood.

As a village prepares for a festival celebrating the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Templars — what a dumb idea — the village idiot Murdo sacrifices a young girl and brings them back from the dead. Any of the romantic drama between fireworks man Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) and his Vivian (Esperanza Roy), his ex-lover and now fiancee of the town’s mayor, will have to wait until the Knights kill everyone.

De Ossorio wrote, directed and designed the Templar make-up for this. The Spanish version, El ataque de los muertos sin ojos, has more gore, like the Templars straight up devouring a human heart. That’s how you do it!

If you’re someone that complains that this movie has day for night errors and has a slow pace that seems glacial, I’m going to hate you forever. This is doom metal on film. Tune in, drop down, drink blood, smoke up.

Sure, the Canadian Mounties are all using modern revolvers, but let’s just enjoy this pre-Italian Western made in Spain by future Blind Dead creator Amando de Ossorio, the story of the Hudson Bay area. All of this land was owned by the fur trading Hudson Bay Company who was opposed by the indigenous people of the region who found themselves working with French trappers to battle big business and the British empire. James Sullivan (Santiago Rivero) is the man the company hires to put a stop to these people and keep the money flowing. The rebels are led by Leo Limoux (Franco Fantasia) and the film’s hero, Victor DeFrois (George Martin), tries to stay out of things until Sullivan kills his brother.

That’s when a plan is made to kidnap Sullivan’s daughter Ann (Giulia Rubini) and, of course, she falls in love with Victor and he with her. Diana Lorys is also in this as a saloon girl and Pamela Tudor as Swa, Limoux’s lover.

Also known as Canadian Wilderness and Rebels In Canada, the actual Hudson River area is in New York, not Canada, but that’s OK. This is more swashbuckling adventure than Western, so we can forgive so much. The locations are great, the action is good, the leads are gorgeous and the end has about a hundred people get killed.

De Ossorio only made two Westerns and I kind of like them both!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) has unintentionally won a screen test when he shows remorse for a past crime. This convinces casting director Dabney Shaw (Larry Miller) that he’s a method actor and ready to head out to Los Angeles. At a party thrown by Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen), who has recently come to terms with his daughter Veronica over his wife’s inheritance, he meets the man who is to prepare him for the role he’s been hired for, Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer) and also runs into someone he’s been in love with since he was seven, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan).

And then things get weird.

Partially based on the Brett Halliday novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them, Shane Black was on a downward slide when he wrote this, suffering through the failure of The Long Kiss Goodnight and a rejection letter from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He tried to get away from action and worked on a romantic comedy, but ended up back where he started. However, this was an attempt to reimagine the detective genre, using the spirit of the 1950s and 1960s yet modern characters. For example. Perry is gay, but Black wanted in include his sexuality as he had never seen “the gay guy who kicks down the door, shoots everyone, and bails your ass out before.”

Originally titled You’ll Never Die in This Town Again, this was the movie that showed Hollywood that Downey was ready to be a star again. He has said that this movie was “in some ways the best film I’ve ever done.” As for Kilmer, well, he missed doing comedy.

I loved everything about this movie, which is because, well, I love everyone in it. And I love Shane Black. This is the first movie he directed and he was asked by Empire, why is it set, like nearly all of his movies, over the holidays? He answered: ““I really wanted to set it at Christmas. At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about it. It seemed natural, because I hadn’t done a film at that time for quite some years. And there was no hesitation because I went with Joel Silver, and we’d already done a Christmas movie together with Lethal Weapon. Even Last Action Hero was a Christmas movie. So it was, why not? And Christmas helped a lot. The idea of this lonely guy in a brand new city at Christmas, wandering. It’s a bizarre, ironic take on Christmas in LA. It’s not Christmassy at all, except it’s, “There are miracles to find if you look closely enough for them.” Harry even says, “Last Christmas, we kind of changed the world,” meaning “We actually did something at Christmas that a) mattered and b) was impossible.” It was one of my favorite things to work on.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 20, 2020.  It’s back because Cauldron has released an absolutely stunning version of it on blu ray featuring a 2K restoration from the negative, both English and Italian audio options, CD soundtrack with music from Bruno Nicolai, and brand new extras including an interview with Master Katsutoshi Mikuriya, a visual essay by film historian Eric Zaldivar, commentary with film historian Mike Hauss from The Spaghetti Western Digest, a trailer, poster and high-quality slipcase. You get buy it from Cauldron.

According to the Spaghetti Western Database, lead actor Chen Lee may have been a Japanese karate instructor, but according to director Mario Caiano (Eye In the Labyrinth), he worked in a laundry, not in a dojo, and was picked because he looked like a young Dustin Hoffman. Some think his real name was Mioshini Hayakawa, which is Japanese, not Chinese. That said, if that being racist — not knowing the difference between two countries nearly 1,900 miles away from one another — then this movie is not for you.

Seriously, nearly every race gets denigrated in this movie audibly and physically. Luckily, Shanghai Joe ends up killing every single offender.

Also — the Bruno Nicolai music — recycled from Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay — is so good you’ll want to stick around for the whole movie.

Shanghai — or Chin Hao — has come to this country and instead of finding whatever it is he’s looking for — he has tattoos much like Kwai Chang Caine — he’s found that aforementioned racism and a love interest in Cristina (Carla Romanelli, Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen, The Lonely Lady).

Our hero’s skills as a fighting man make their way to cattle rancher Stanley Spencer (Piero Lulli, Kill, Baby…Kill!), who is really enslaving Mexicans to do his work. That means that the bad guys decide to kill him, but none of them can get it done.

Spencer ends up hiring four different killers, much like video game bosses, to do his work for him. There’s Tricky the Gambler (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Pedro the Cannibal (Robert Hundar, Sabata), Buryin’ Sam (Gordon Mitchell, who improvised and sang the song “Chin-Chin Chinaman” while carrying a shovel to try to kill Shanghai) and Scalper Jack (an astonishing Klaus Kinski, who is obsessed with hair and you genuinely fear for the life of Romanelli in their scene).

Finally, Mikuja, the only person who has the same martial arts technique and tattoo as our hero, is hired to kill him. Their battle may not be a fight on the order of a Shaw Brothers technical battle, but it’s still fun.

This movie is incredibly strange, because every time I thought it was going to be normal, it would go from slapstick to our hero plucking out a bad guy’s eye and blood spraying all over the place. It’s closer to a horror film set in the West with martial arts than a straight-up Italian Western, but it’s better for that difference.

Totally recommended.

As you know, I do love alternate titles. This was known in the U.S. as When the Screaming Stops and even better, The Swinging Monster, both titles that make no sense, what with this being set in an indeterminate time and the only swinging coming from how many gorgeous women are in it. That said, the first other title got a gimmick from distributor Independent Artists, who added Shock Notice, turning the screen red with flashing lights before each murder.

Directed and written by Amando de Ossorio, this is about a German boarding school for girls — parents, don’t send your babies to German boarding schools — where the young ladies are getting murdered in such bloody and horrifying ways during every full moon. This leads to the teacher, Elke Ackerman (Silvia Tortosa, Horror Express) to hire a hunter named Sigurd (Tony Kendall, The Whip and the Body) to protect her pupils.

Each night, Sigurd patrols the school grounds — noticing the many gorgeous students under his protection, naturally — before he meets Sigurd a cloaked woman (Helga Liné) that he keeps missing despite chasing her. He also meets Professor Von Lander (Ángel Menéndez) who has made a dagger that can transform the creature — the Loreley — back to her human form. And as you can imagine, he’s already fallen for her, despite his job and the fact that she’s killed numerous people.

Sigurd is also in love with Elke — maybe he’s The Swinging Monster — and Loreley has already gone after her while restraining him in the undersea cave where she lives with an army of feral women. It’s an entire world removed from our own, like another time and place, which our somewhat modern man destroys with bombs before leaving behind the monstrous world and embracing a love of reason. I’m not so sure I’d make the same choice.

I’ve read a lot of reviews that make fun of this movie, that say it has bad effects, that it’s kind of stupid. Those people are small minded sad folks who can’t embrace the world of Eurohorror, where every man looks like a superhero and every young girl’s bodice is practically either ripped open or covered in blood. A world where gorgeous women lie in wait inside lagoon caves, ready to transform and destroy.