A Hole In My Heart is a major departure for director Lukas Moodysson, this is a disjointed captured on handheld and in your face tale in which an adult scene between Rickard (Thorsten Flinck), Geko (Goran Marjanovic) and Tess (Sanna Bråding) is being filmed in an apartment while Rickard’s son Erik (Björn Almrot) attempts to avoid the rapidly disturbing events in the next room.

Yet that attempts to put some form of narrative on this film, which is disconcerting, filled with blasts of noise and horrific imagery of vaginal reconstruction surgery, a female masturbation scene that involves licking a filthy bathroom floor, toys reciting the dialogue and time and space being decimated by how the story unfurls, curls and is torn into shreds. Meanwhile, as the world sends next door and the line between mondo and snuff is about to be crossed, Erik remains in his room, blasting himself with industrial music and attempting to bring dirt inside the home to grow plants, nature reclaiming itself inside a suffocating small place nearly as destructive as the people within it.

I get the feeling from reading about how this was made that this was a horrific film to make for the actors and that Flinck claimed that he had to be high to make the movie. What emerges feels raw, dangerous and something you get the feeling that you might not want to watch but can’t look away from.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Extras include interviews with Moodysson, a behind-the-scenes feature, a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on February 6, 2022 and is posted again as Blue Underground has released a 4K UHD of this movie, which looks gorgeous.

It features Ultra HD Blu-ray and HD Blu-ray Widescreen feature presentations of the film. Extras include new audio commentary from film historians Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth; interviews with Jess Franco, Harry Alan Towers, Marie Liljedahl and Christopher Lee; Stephen Thrower discussing the film, a Jack Taylor interview, a trailer and a newly expanded poster and still gallery.

You can order it from MVD.

An adaptation and modern-day update of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, this was the second de Sade film made by Jess Franco*, but by no means the last. In fact, it’s not even the last movie called Eugenie that he would make. While this one is Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (or De Sade 70 or Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir), there’s also the better-known — and Soledad Miranda-starring — Eugenie de Sade.

Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl, Inga, Dorian Gray) has spent her entire life in a convent and despite an exterior that drives men and women wild with list, she’s inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her father (Paul Muller, Nana, Barbed Wire Dolls) wants to bed Madame Saint Ange (Maria Rohm, the wife of producer Harry Alan Towers who appears in 99 Women, Venus In Furs and The Bloody Judge amongst other movies; don’t judge her being in this as nepotism, because she’s amazing in this movie), who agrees as long as she can take Eugenie to her secluded island mansion, where she and her step-brother Mirvel (Jack Taylor, whose career in exploitation movies took him all over the world) can seduce her and probably each other and definitely everyone and play the kind of strange incestual games that only the super rich seem to play.

Sir Christopher Lee also shows up as the narrator for all this wallowing and also as Dolmance, the leader of a cult of fiends that drug young women and beat them with whips and yeah, Sir Christopher claims he had no idea what kind of movie he was in, which I find hilarious, because this wouldn’t be the last time he’d work with Franco. Providing his own wardrobe — the smoking jacket he wore in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace — Lee claimed that he was unaware there was a nude woman on the sacrificial altar behind him, as Franco and crew had wrapped drapery over her that they’d yank off as soon as the camera started and would then recover her when he was done with his scene. I mean, I love Jess, but sometimes he can barely focus the camera. One wonders how he’d ever had the chicanery and ability to pull one over on a man that was once quite literally a secret agent.

This movie feels like a dream. I’ve said that of other Franco movies, but trust me, a much better realized and better shot dream, with a score by Bruno Nicolai that makes it seem way classier than it is.

There’s a scene where Jack Taylor won’t stop messing with the blinds, the camera goes way out of focus for an extended period and Maria Rohm is near Satanic. David Sodergren on Letterboxd said that Franco’s films seem better when he’s working under the threat of Spanish censorship. It forces his films to not show you everything while at once feeling packed with sinful moments that worm their way into your brain. They are more erotic for their hard work in the face of opression with no need for Franco’s later obsessive need to show you every inch of his female cast.

*The first is Marquis de Sade: Justine.

The Lake of the Virgins is Jess Franco making Treasure Island, but this being Jess Franco, this concerns a young man and his drunken grandfather seeking treasure but the boy instead discovers three sirens who are the offspring of native girls and pirates. Despite his grandfather paying a working girl to deflower our protagonist, he’s fascinated by the women and is given their care by their dying mother, which means he ends up making love to all of them — Paula, the main sister, is played by Katja Bienert from Killer Barbys vs. Dracula and Linda — before others come to the island that care more for treasure than young lust.

There isn’t a great print of this — give the world of boutique blu ray labels time, all Franco movies will be available in the finest formats someday, one believes — this has gorgeous scenery and Franco being chaste for him, which is sex-obsessed for any other director.

If you like this, he also made the more mainstream Fifteen-Year-Old Captain.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

With Lilya 4-Ever, Lukas Moodysson moves from stories of children dealing with growing up or living in a commune with a very different teen. This is based on Danguolė Rasalaitė, a 16-year-old girl from Lithuania who had come to Sweden in 2000 and was kept by a pimp who forced her to repay him for travel expenses by prostituting herself. She escaped only to later by assaulted by her boyfriend and two others, leading to her jumping off a bridge and dying. Three letters that she had told the story, which became a major story in the country. In fact, this film has been used in Eastern European countries. to warn young women about human trafficking.

Lilya Michailova (Oksana Akinshina) believes that she is leaving with her mother for America, but instead she’s abandoned to be with her aunt, who takes her nice apartment and leaves her behind. Her school life is not much better, as a rumor begins that she’s a prostitute and she ends up raped before she decides to just follow the stories and start making money with her body. This journey takes her away from her only friend Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), an abused boy who soon ends his life, taking the form of an angel who tries to atone for his death and fix Lilya’s life. Yet by the time she gets to Sweden, another man has lied to her and she’s trapped by a violent pimp. By the end, the bridge is waiting to take her away from this world and to two potential happy endings, one in which she changes her path and another where she and Volodya make it to some form of the afterlife.

Volodja has a lesson in this, as he says, “I killed myself and went to Heaven and yeah, it’s really good in Heaven. But I regret it, ’cause I wanted to live on Earth a little longer. You remain dead for all eternity, but you’re alive only for a brief moment.”

Moodysson has really made a turn in this film, showing a dark side of life and not just alienation and anxiety. It’s a depressing film yet has moments of joy buried inside.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Extras include interviews with Moodysson and Östholm, a Guardian interview with Moodysson, a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.

The Full Moon Features Deadly Ten series has brought us Necropolis: Legion, Weedies! Halloweed Night, Blade: The Iron Cross and will also include Subspecies V: Blood Rise, Bride of the Head of the Family, The Hourglass, Femalien: Cosmic Crush, Shadowheart Crush and The Grim Rapper.

Brinke Stevens, who was Taffy in the original Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, is behind the camera, with a script by Kent Roudebush, who has written several films for Full Moon including several of the Evil Bong films. I say written but so much of this is little copy and paste from the first movie, except for two great ideas; Kelli Maroney is the matron for the sorority, Auntie Snake, and is the sister of Linnea Quigley’s Spider (who shows up in the Todd Sheets* film Clownado) and Stevens and Michelle Bauer’s Taffy and Lisa characters show up as ghosts when the imp (Derek Jeremiah Reid) pops up out of the bowling trophy.

David DeCoteau left over creative differences — one wonders if it wasn’t “Hey, you’re just making the same movie all over again” — and there’s no Linnea, but you know, I was charmed when Brinke and Bauer showed up and I’m equally happy that Brinke was given a chance to direct this. It’s a little over an hour long, which I can appreciate, and while none of it will be as memorable to me as the original, I did like Bitsy (Glory Rodriguez), the tough girl with a spider patch on her leather vest and who fulfills the same role as Quigley, the only female not dumb enough to make a wish.

The one big difference I can think of from the past as when one of the frat guys makes out with one of the sorority sisters, he realizes that her pleasure is important, so he lifts her onto a ball-polishing machine that vibrates.

Now that Stevens has her first movie done, I’d like to see her grow as a director and try something else, something bigger and grow to make a movie that goes beyond the past. I know she can do it.

*Sheets must love the original because he also made Sorority Babes in the Dance-a-Thon of Death.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Vicky White was a respected jail guard just getting ready to retire, a widow with no children, who found herself in a special relationship with one of her prisoners, Casey White. This went from extra food on his tray and special privileges to her selling her house for cash and going on the run with him for eleven days before he was caught and she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Directed by Jodi Binstock and written by Guy Nicolucci (Tubi’s Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial), this stars Nicholle Tom (Maggie Sheffield from The Nanny, Ryce from Beethoven) as Vicky — to be fair, she’s way more attractive than the real thing but isn’t that the point of a made for TV or Tubi movie? — and Adam Mayfield as Casey.

It’s a strange film because while so much is based on life, there are also moments of off humor, like Vicky leaving town while all the rest of the guards are trying to throw her a sad retirement party with a grocery store cake that was probably thrown together in moments despite her having a 17-year-career at the jail and being a four-time employee of the month. Or how obsessed she is with tanning. Or how Casey keeps calling her Taylor Swift. Or when she finally gets to fulfill all of her fantasies with him, he’d rather fold a pizza in half and eat it all by himself.

This happened on April 29, 2022 and somehow, Tubi was able to get a movie on the air before the end of the year. That’s the kind of scummy filmmaking that old made for TV movies and cash-in exploitation films can only dream of. Maybe we should be forgiving of the fact that this depicts Evansville, IN as having a Piggly Wiggly and palm trees. I mean, I always thought Haddonfield, IL had at least one of those.

You can watch this on Tubi.

One of the things I had to learn when I got married was who was who in the true crime stories of not just the headlines, but going back for decades. My wife and her father used to watch these stories unfold in real time and had the same kind of language about them that I do about my obsessions like Jess Franco movies, Steve Ditko self-published Ayn Rand-inspired superheroes and mid-90s Japanese independent pro wrestling.

Tubi gets their audience and while they have an Italian horror and giallo category for me, they also are producing true crime docs for my wife. Like Love You to Death: The Jodi Arias Story, which gets into the real story — as written by Savannah Lucas, who has worked on Snapped and Tubi’s Suburban Nightmare: Jon Benét Ramsey — of Jodi, her relationship with Travis Victor Alexander and how he ended up with a bullet in the head and 27 knife wounds.

This was one of the first social media trials and this gets into everything, including how Jodi was selling artwork on eBay, which is pretty wild. Who wants that?

Today, Arias is jailed at the Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville in the medium security section. That hasn’t stopped Lifetime from making Bad Behind Bars: Jodi Arias. This documentary does have several of the real officers involved in the case, as well as several bloggers and media people, all to give the full picture and generally, that picture is that Jodi was wrong and that every step of the way, they knew she was wrong and that she’s still wrong.

If you know true crime at the heights that my wife does, there’s nothing new here for you. But for husbands who need to do some homework, well, this is pretty quick and you’ll have something to talk to your wife about.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Together is set in the world of sharehome communes in 1970s Stockholm. Göran (Gustaf Hammarsten) is the leader but his gentle nature basically just has him keeping everyone from fighting over politics and even food. But when his sister Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren) makes a break from her abusive husband Rolf (Michael Nyqvist) and moves in along with her children Eva (Emma Samuelsson) and Stefan (Sam Kessel), dynamics start to shift. For example, Göran’s girlfriend Lena (Anja Lundqvist) wants the benefit of the open relationships that come with living in the commune, but she doesn’t want to navigate all of the personalities and responsibilities that come with this lifestyle.

Meanwhile, ex-husband and wife Lasse (Ole Rapace) and Anna (Jessica Liedberg) still live in the commune and their son Tet becomes friends with Steven, where they bond at playing a game where one is Augusto Pinochet and the other is a political prisoner being tortured. As for Eva, she falls for a neighbor whose family shows disdain for the commune but engages in behavior worse than what they claim to dislike so much. To be honest, the children are lost, aliens in their new school and nearly all alone at home as their parents seem to forget them as they try to establish their new sexual identities.

Moodysson filmed a sequel to this in 2022 called Together 99 in which Göran and Klas establish a new commune. Nearly everyone returned, except Nyqvist, who died in 2017, and Ola Rapace who was replaced by Jonas Karlsson.

The tagline to this film, “One house; one revolutionary; two open straight marriages; three gay people (maybe four); three children; two carnivores and eight vegetarians; there’s only one way they’re going to make it… together.” will tell you all you need to know. As for that fourth maybe, that would be the previously mentioned Klas.

Moodysson excels in this film by showing what life is like in a living situation that I will never experience. He shows the highs and lows and the real life behind what for many is either past history or a fantasy.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Together appears as a 4K restoration by the Swedish Film Institute from the original camera negative, approved by Moodysson and cinematographer Ulf Brantås. There’s also interviews with Moodysson, script supervisor Malin Fornander and editor Michal Leszczylowski, deleted scenes, a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.

Show Me Love was originally titled Fucking Åmål in reference to one of its leads, Erin, who yells, “Varför måste vi bo i fucking jävla kuk-Åmål?” (Why do we have to live in fucking bloody cock-Åmål?). As the movie was going to be Swedish entry to the Academy Awards, the country itself wanted the name changed, as did the city, which claimed that the name of the movie would show their town in an unfair light and may even cost their economy. Variety even refused to run ads for it. So Moodysson just took the title of the Robyn song on the soundtrack and gave this movie its new name.

As you can imagine, after its success, Åmål has now embraced the movie and even has a Fucking Åmål Festival.

Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg) and Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) are two students who have different outlooks on life. Agnes has no one close to her and is always depressed, while Elin is surrounded by friends and yet finds her life dull. They start to get to know one another and Elin confesses how trapped their small town makes them so they attempt to leave for Stockholm, but are kicked out of a car when the driver catches their first kiss. Of course, Elin is not sure about this relationship, wondering if she’s meant to be with Johan before realizing that perhaps this love is the one good thing about their small town.

As you’ll discover watching the full career of Moodysson, this coming of age film is just the start of his ability. Ingman Bergman said that this was, “a young master’s first masterpiece.” I’m so excited that I got to watch nearly his entire filmography in one week.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Show Me Love appears as a 2K restoration by the Swedish Film Institute, approved by director Moodysson and cinematographer Ulf Brantå. Extras include new interviews with Moodysoon and Alexandra Dahlström, an appreciation by Dr. Clara Bradbury Rance, author of Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory, a short film named Talk (Bara prata lite), a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.