First off, major points for the title, which you can guess has nothing to do with Meir Zarchi’s movie.

Twenty five years ago, a chainsaw killer was wiping out young lovers and you know what would be a bad idea? To open a research station on the grounds, right in the upper peninsula of Michigan, top of the mitten. The grounds were supposed to be sold to a man who was just back from Vietnam, but his father sold it from under him to his brother who soon died. None of this sounds safe. Nor does leaving your van miles from the cabin because of mud. Just turn around.

There’s a jerk local cop — I should have just said local cop and you’d have added that adjective in your head — as well as scientists doing what they do, which in this is having lots of sex. There’s also a protective butch character named Terry who deals out Tarot cards and is good with a shotgun and if you think I was sad that she got killed you have been reading my words.

You can also tell that Alex Black, who played Shelly, is the actress most comfortable with nudity, as she’s naked more often than not. I guess she’s a naturalism expert. If a scene had her playing volleyball like a 60s nudie cutie I would not be surprised.

The box art has nothing to do with this movie, promising so much more than is delivered, which I respect, but then again, the end of this movie makes up for everything as it has an appearance by Chekov’s woodchipper.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

No, this isn’t the other title for Fernando Di Leo’s 1980 home invasion slasher Madness. I mean, that one has Joe Dallesandro in it.

This one was directed by Brian Labuda when he was just a teenager and had access to a family video camera, but go with me on this. It’s not bad. I mean, the kid was in eighth grade when he made this, his friends all seem so much younger and yet they were able to come together and make a forty-minute SOV horror movie complete with early 2000s punk touchstones like a nearly brand new Ramones shirt and yes, a Goldfinger tee.

Better than it has any right to be, this film puts you dead center into a 2000s version of “do you want to see a dead body” except that it’s “do you want to see several dead bodies and perhaps even be one of them?”

We all had hobbies as a kid like drawing comics or playing in bands, right? No one is ever going to see my scribbled remixes of comics like Grips and Mr. A. They will also never hear my horrific high school hair metal band Nasty Habitz or Pretty Boy Floyd or even my 2000s rap rock outfit Mr. Blonde. Yet everyone in this movie has been trapped in amber and we can see their past fun and marvel at not only how entertaining it is, but how much of a joy it had to be to make.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Joey and Toby are doing what all delinquents did in 1991 and that’s racing their BMX bikes instead of learning in school. Soon, they discover a miniature coffin with a statue of the demon Asteroth inside and even when a spirit that looks like a younger Reverend Henry Kane appears and tells them to just stop, then laugh and keep it. Where do you find a coffin in the Nevada desert? Anyways, later that night, Joey’s brother Josh has a seance party — seriously, what else is there to do but try and drive into the middle of nowhere to find a generator-powered Kyuss performance? — and like a bunch of kids playing Sabbath in their garage and sounding not that bad, this movie decides to riff on a cover of Night of the Demons.

Joey also is cool enough to have a poster of the remake of The Blob in his bedroom, so I was on his side.

Then this movie delivers what its body and eyeball-strewn credits promised: demonic possession and relentless gore. Seriously, a Fulci-worshipping eyeball decimation, heads literally rolling, a saw through the crotch and bodies literally shredded in half.

Director and writer Charles Lang also made High Desert, in which partying teens run into a biker gang. Also, IMDB lists the wrestler Taz in this and honestly, you’d think I’d remember if Taz was in this. I think whoever did the IMDB saw that a character named Rocky is played by someone named Tazz and went with it.

Stick through all the 90s dude talk and basketball scenes. You are about to see something special.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed, written and produced by David Schwartz, Las Vegas Bloodbath follows the storyline of so many SOV films, which seem to be indebted to Herschell Gordon Lewis movies that came out two decades before: man gets screwed over, man goes insane, man brutally murders women as the camera focuses on the gore.

Sam Butler returns to Las Vegas after a business deal and finds his wife Ruth in the arms of a cop whose gun he takes and kills both of them. He cuts off his wife’s head and goes off, stabbing sex workers in the face, pulling their legs off with a car, shooting a bartender, using a shovel on a gardener and then attacking the Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers at a bridal shower that starts with him tearing a baby out of the soon-to-be mother Barbara, then wiping out everyone else, bathing in their blood and then killing another police officer.

Oh yeah, he also cuts a Jehovah’s Witness guy’s head off.

Imagine Maniac without any of the talent. Or more cocaine, if possible. But instead of the grimy world of New York at the end of the world, this is in Vegas, sunbaked city of sin transformed into a family destination but still a place where oil wrestling women have baby showers where women call one another bitch and whore and then have fashion shows for one another while drinking beer and eating donuts. You know, that sounds like a great day other than, you know, seeing a baby get tossed into the next room.

Do you want oil wrestling with your misogyny, this film stupidly asks, and certainly there are enough people who rented or bought this. Also: daytime whores, a line from the film, is the perfect band name.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s another take on this movie. 

Doug (Mark Williams) is a wedding videographer — did he teach the Bergeron Brothers: Wedding Videographers? — who keeps dreaming of making a horror movie. When he meets Rails (Al Darago, who co-directed and co-wrote this with Doug Ulrich, who one assumes is the inspiration for the character in this movie), the lead singer of a shock rock metal band, he finds a kindred spirit who can help him make the movie he’s been fantasizing about. Unfortunately, Rails is also a killer and using the movie to create grisly murder scenes that begin to fascinate Doug and make him complicit in the crimes.

People get dynamite in their mouths, bodies are hung up and chainsawed in half and heads roll. If you like erotic knife torture, I think this was made for you. Once you watch a few of these scenes, you’ll figure out why this movie was also named Snuff Kill. There are plenty of stabbings in this with a variety of implements and despite its low budget SOV origins, it all looks pretty good. In fact, the grainy and grimy nature of this format adds to the overall feel.

Ulrich and Durango also made Scary Tales, Darkest Soul and 7 Sins of the Vampire together and all of those are pretty fun, too. I kind of love that Rails’ band looks all grim and kvlt, then sounds like more of a 60s psychedelic band than the SUNN O))) you expect them to be playing what with all those robes. There’s also a band on the soundtrack called Thee Enigma Jar. The other band is called Surefire and yes, that’s Doug and Al’s band.

SRS put this out on DVD a few years ago and I just love that this has been upgraded for today.

Chuck (Andy Nichols, one of the doctors in Nightdreams and Max Melodramatic from Cafe Flesh) and Buck (Louie Bonanno, who was in Chuck Vincent’s Slammer Girls and also appeared along with Nichols in Dark’s In Search of… the Perfect 10) leave their women behind and go to a new wave whorehouse — in case you’re wondering about that term, stick around — called Madame Mondo’s Zombie Palace, where they try and find the perfect zombie women and just end up tied to the wall in tutus.

Before they get turned into women, their better halves — Sue (Michelle Bauer, who has been in everything from uncredited roles in Get Crazy and Tomboy to Roller Blade, Nightmare Sisters, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Evil Toons and so many more great films; as Pia Snow she was also an adult actress and is also in Cafe Flesh) and Lulu (Connie Woods, The Forbidden Dance) — have to come and save them from Madame Mondo and her assistant Igor (Cynthia Clegg).

The zombie women include adult star Blondi (who also worked as Blondi Bee; she shows up in the KISS eXposed video as their personal envelope licker), Teri Lynn Peake (Penthouse Pet of the Month for October 1987), Ashley Elstad, Violet Lickness and Lisa Devine.

If this feels like a late 80s adult feature, well, that’s no accident. Director and producer Jon Valentine is actually Gregory Dark! Writer Veronica Cinq-Mars was really Anthony R. Lovett, who was also Antonio Passolini, the director of some late 80s sequels to classic adult films like — you guessed it — Cafe Flesh, The Devil In Miss Jones and even Dark’s New Wave Hookers. He also used the name Johnny Jump-Up to write Dark’s White Bunbusters, Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout Black Chicks, Deep Inside Vanesse del Rio, The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning and The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage. He was also the head of production for VCA Pictures, which pretty much ruled adult in the 80s. He’s also the Anthony “Tex” Lovett that wrote Faces of Death rip-off Inhumanities II: Modern Atrocities and Gesichter des Todes V, which was sold in Germany as the fifth Faces of Death and has scenes taken directly from the former film as well as Death Faces IV. There was a Gorgon Video-released Faces of Death 5 in the U.S., but it’s just clips from the other four movies. The German one, though, lists Countess Victoria Bloodhart as a director (who is also credited with a fourth installment of Mondo Cane which is just more recycled clips and stolen footage from Nick Bougas’ Death Scenes and, yes, Inhumanities II: Modern Atrocities which was directed by Wesley P. Emerson, the director of nearly every Deep Inside 80s adult compilation). Ah,man — Lovett also wrote most of Michael Ninn’s stuff too.

Most amazingly, Gesichter des Todes V also has footage taken from Stelvio Masi, who as Max Steel was the director of Hell’s Heroes, Taxi Killer, Arabella: Black Angel and probably the movie those Germans ripped off to make their fake sequel, Savage World Today. Of course, he also made tons of awesome Italian crime movies like Convoy Busters, Magnum Cop and Highway Racer.

That was a tangent, huh?

Anyways! Gregory Dark! The man who reinvented porn in the 80s and brought a sense of punk energy to what had become a very staid video formula made this and it’s a lot like all of his movies of the era minus the sexual gymnastics. He’d go on to pretty much also own the adult thriller section of your video store, as well as Showtime and Cinemax after midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. And oh yeah, directed a few hundred music videos before reinventing himself again and making mainstream movies.

There you go. Greg Dark stealing a Romero title and trying to make a mainstream softcore movie with the same sensibilities as his porn work. Thanks for listening.

Leslie and Joan Stanton are sisters played by real life sisters Leslie and Joan Simon and they like to post video personal ads, marry financially stable men and murder them, all with the someday dream of owning their own mortuary business just like their father once had.

Then Aunt Ingrid shows up and screws everything up.

She’s played by director and writer Nick Millard’s wife Irmgard and she’s something else. She’s got a bag packed with lingerie and wants to be part of the singles scenes — and swap lovers maybe — with these two ladies. Except, you know, there are a lot of bodies.

This being a Nick Millard movie, you can be sure that it’s about an hour, that it’s padded with whole scenes from Criminally Insane and Satan’s Black Wedding, that it’s deranged and that it seems like hairbrushing scenes go on forever and then happen again. You can also be certain that this was made in his house and that it feels weird, the kind of weird that isn’t easily explainable and isn’t “fever dream” or “slow burn” but just plain strange and not to show off. The weird that feels earned.

Where are the Nick Millards of today, the people filming their wives as insane horny aunts and finding people to sit around their house being murderers who clean up crime scenes with so many rolls of paper towels?

Unlike many of the shot on videos featured on the site the last few days, The Killing Edge was directed by someone who had made several films, Lindsay Shonteff. One of his first films was 1964’s Devil Doll, but he may be best-known for a series of James Bond remix remake ripoff movies that started with Licensed to Kill and continued to include Spy Story, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun. He also made The Million Eyes of Sumuru, Permissive, Night After Night After Night and as budgets lowered in the mid 80s, he started shooting on video. Beyond this movie, he also made the video giallo Lipstick and Blood.

Working from a script by Robert Bauer (who also wrote Shonteff’s Vietnam movie How Sleep the Brave), this is the story of a man — Bill French (Steve Johnson) — wandering the post-apocalyptic wastelands with only a stuffed teddy bear as he searches for his family, who he finds just in time for them to be killed by robotic Terminators, which is why this was released in West Germany as Killing Edge – Super Gau Terminator.

They are not robots. This is not exciting. In fact, it seems like it was made up while it was being made, just like many shot on video projects. The difference is, again, Shonteff who at one point was someone who made actual films.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Two different aliens — the humanoid Mirusian and the pig-appearing Ghastorian — have been battling over a Death Sphere that accidentally dropped off on Earth by goofball Mirusian janitor Nagillig — and because it looks just like a beach ball, it is fated to land on a beach and have some nerd scientists and surfer dudes try to figure out what’s happening. Oh yeah, they also become friends with Nagillig.

There’s a lot of weed smoking — one probably correctly believes that it was this way behind the camera as well — and death by surfboard, which doesn’t happen all that often. The death comes from Ghastorian commander Lord Odem and his henchman, who lie in wait at an old house, where Dr. Bateman has been studying UFOs. Also: sunscreen can defeat aliens, so someone alert Baz Luhrmann.

Director and writer Andy Gizzarelli never made another film, but has worked on a producer on the HBO remake of Perry Mason, Bridgerton, And Just Like That…, True Detective, Big Little Lies and Feast. The amount that you will enjoy this movie is based on how much you can stand helium voices or people who sound like they’re trying too hard to be Jeff Spicoli.

That said, it’s a beach party science fiction slasher and there aren’t many movies that can say that.

You can watch this on YouTube.