Kino Cult is a new label that embraces a trademark brand of “unapologetically weird” with such diverse genres as European erotica, grindhouse classics, and cinematic rediscoveries that defy categorization. One of their first three releases is Alien Outlaw, a video rental favorite from North Carolina indie Phil Smoot.

This release has a 4K Restoration from 35mm materials, a featurette with Smoot and the cast — who also have a commentary track — as well as an interview with editor Sherwood Jones and archival interviews and features.

I love the packaging of the Kino Cult movies and am excited that the label is committed to physical media releases of some strange stuff. You can get Alien Outlaw from Kino Lorber.

If you didn’t get enough of Lash LaRue in The Dark Power, have I got good news for you! The master of the whip — no, not El Latigo or Indiana Jones — returns to battle aliens this time, in a movie directed by Phil Smoot, whose name I will drunkenly yell at people for years because it amuses me.

Smoot also directed — surprise, surprise — The Dark Power, as well as serving as a camera operator on Carnival Magic, a movie that has wiped out whatever brain cells I had left from art school.

Jesse Jamison (Kari Anderson) is a gun-shooting lady about to put on a show in a small Southern town — it was shot in Allegheny County and Sparta, North Carolina — and then some aliens just so happen to show up. Luckily, she has the help of locals like Alex (LaRue) and Sunset (Sunset Carson, a former rodeo star who became a B-level cowboy star for Republic in the 1940s).

Much like Without Warning, this movie somehow rips off Predator years before that movie was made.  Life’s weird like that sometimes. It’s amazing that LaRue would return to be in these low budget movies. At one point he was of the biggest actors in cowboy movies and even toured showing of his films, showing that he could actually do all of the whip stunts for real.

Sadly, he ended up playing a villain in a pornographic western, Hard on the Trail. I say sad not because I look down on adult movies, but because no one told LaRue it was a movie with sex. He was so upset that he became a missionary for ten years and didn’t come back to act until 1984’s Chain Gang. That said, LaRue was no angel. He was married ten times and was also in Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me.