April 5: Visual Vengeance Day — Write about a movie released by Visual Vengeance. Here’s a list to help you find a movie.

No, not that Things.

This Things has had so many sequels — I watched Things II before it — and it’s an anthology film of two stories and a wraparound which is directed by Eugene James (Sorority House Vampires) and written by Mike Bowler (Hell Spa, Fatal Images). A woman (Kinder Hunt) catches her husband Jack (in a hotel room, sleeping with his mistress Jane (Maegen). She ties her to a chair and decides that she’s going to tell her two stories before she kills her, but ends up keeping her in a garage with all of the other old mistresses. Some are alive, and many are dead, and how do they keep them all fed?

The first of those stories is “The Box,” directed and written by Dennis Devine (Dead Girls). It’s the story of a small town run by a mayor and his corrupt officials, who are upset that women are moving there to start a den of sin and sleeping with the menfolk. There’s also a slug creature who lives in a box, and many of the area’s men are obsessed with one of the girls, Tulip (Kathleen O’Donnel).

The other tale is “The Thing in a Jar,” which was directed by Jay Woelfel (Asylum of Darkness, Beyond Dream’s Door) and written by Steve Jarvis (Amazon Warrior).

Woefel said, “Things was my first feature as a director in LA (about half of a feature). I didn’t know that part of my job was to help re-unite a group of people who had started to make a film and then stopped. As the new kid on the project, I was someone who could excite the rest to finish what had seemingly ended badly.

My episode in the anthology is about a woman who has really violent dreams in which her seemingly lovely husband does increasingly horrible things to her. My marching orders from producer Dave Sterling were to include some nudity and make it really violent.

The film’s structure is a largely comical wraparound story and two actual stories within that. It seems like a workable anthology structure that could be used more.

It was a wild film in many ways, including the monster in my episode, which is a melted-together slimy hodgepodge of eyes, hands, and teeth. But not in the way that meant it was shot on film; this time, it was videotaped. This seemingly modest film was re-released several times and spawned two sequels.

Julia (Courtney Lercara) is in a horrible marriage with Leon (Owen Rutledge) — he tells her that all she has to do in her life is “eat, sleep and fuck” — and learns that he wants her dead. This gets gory as it goes on and feels like an EC Comics story, along with plenty of SOV gore and all the sound problems you expect from the genre. If it bothers you, you’re watching the wrong movies.

Keep an eye out for Jeff Burr (director of Puppet Master 4 and 5) and special effects artist Mike Tristano in this.

Things isn’t as delirious as the Canadian one, but it’s filled with video-era charms. It’s short, sweet and filled with so much grue—and bad accents—that you can’t help but love it.

You can watch this on Tubi.