This is not Sunset Strip, the 1992 Flashdance ripoff.

Nor is it 1993’s Girls of the Sunset Strip, which has Monique Parent in it.

It is also not Richard Pryor: Live On the Sunset Strip, Glitter Goddess of the Sunset Strip, Riot On Sunset Strup, Mayor of the Sunset Strip or Shakedown On the Sunset Strip.

No, this is the 1985 Sunset Strip, directed and written by William Webb (Party Line, The Banker). His movies make Los Angeles feel like a neon soaked nightmare, a place that when I finally got to the Sunset Strip and saw it from high above, I thought, “Right now, there’s a serial killer or a gang dance fighting and I am missing it to be in this lame club.”

Photographer Mark Jefferson (Tom Eplin) decides to help his friend Roger (John Mayall, yes, the Bluesbreakers John Mayall, I’m as surprised as you) protect his bar from organized crime quite unlike but also totally like Road House. Or more like Club Life, but both of those movies came after this even if retroactively this feels like a ripoff.

By the mysteries of movie fate, Mark’s ex Carol (Cheri Cameron Newell) is singing at the club and they fall back in bed within minutes. Then the mob starts running guns through the club and people start getting killed left and right, including the horny landlady who lets Jeff pay via sex years before Kingpin. This also has electrocution torture a few years before Lethal Weapon and I doubt anyone saw this and stole these scenes, but it is prescient, so you have to give it some credit.

Moran (Danny Williams) and his gang kill Roger, frame Mark and then the cops are LA cops, so this goes about as well as you’d expect. Except it looks so much better than it has any reason to. Beyond the endless telephone scenes and chases, this has a neon look that is intoxicating and remembers it’s a 1985 direct-to-video store effort and loads things up with violence and rampant nudity. Also: Shabba Doo cameo!

You can watch this on Tubi.

A co-production between France, Italy and West Germany, this is also known as The Secret of Dr. Mabuse. Maj. Bob Anders (Peter van Eyck, who despite his character’s name keeps coming back to fight Dr. Mabuse; here he’s renamed so they don’t have to pay Bryan Edgar Wallace again) is investigating a death ray created by Prof. Larsen (O.E. Hasse), but he’s not the only one interested. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss has his name in the credits, but he isn’t in this) remains alive, somehow.

Directed by Argentine director Hugo Fregone — who also made Los Monstruos del Terror — and Victor De Santis, and written by Ladislas Fodor, this gets ahead of Bond by having a spy boss named Admiral Quency (Leo Genn) — kind of Q, I guess, right? — who has a burned face, an eyepatch, a wooden arm, and a team of scuba troopers way before Thunderball. Four years after the new Dr. Mabuse started, worried about the paranoia of the post-war era, we’re suddenly in Eurospy territory. There are also three gorgeous women — Gilda Larsen (Yvonne Fourneaux), Judy (Rika Dialina) and Mercedes (Yoko Tani) — to flirt, fight and/or be saved by the hero, who everyone knows is a spy and he’s clueless to figure out why.

The Italian version, I raggi mortali del Dr. Mabuse, is 17 minutes longer yet seemingly moves faster. It also has an alternate edit. Choose that version when you watch this.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! includes this movie, an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.

Directed by Paul May and written by Ladislas Fodor from a story idea by Bryan Edgar Wallace, this time Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) has returned as a ghost and Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla) and takes back his criminal empire. He then orders the death of a professor who has invented a mind control device, which puts the man’s daughter Nancy (Sabine Bethmann) into harm’s way, ready to be saved by hero Bill Tern (Peter van Eyck).

The thing I don’t like about this movie? Tern’s elderly mother (Agnes Windeck) has to save the day again and again. She should be the protagonist in this, not her son, who is dumb enough to jump into a river at one point and nearly die. What I did like was seeing Klaus Kinski show up as a cop who gets hypnotized and placed on the side of evil.

These movies have always hinted at a supernatural side of Dr. Mabuse and now, this one pays that off and somehow is one of the slowest of the series.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! includes this movie, an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.

A remake of the 1933 Fritz Lang film, this finds Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) in Hannibal Lecter mode — I get it, Lecter was in Mabuse mode because this comes first, but let me get back to writing this — and trapped in an asylum where Inspector Lohmann (Gert Frobe) keeps visiting, wanting to know how he’s communicating with criminals despite being locked away.

There’s also a boxer named Jonny Briggs (Helmut Schmid) who becomes part of Mabuse’s gang of henchpeople. Maybe he should just not live this life of crime and spend more time with his girl, Nelly. That’s because she’s played by Senta Berger (The Ambushers, When Women Had Tails), and that’s way cooler than being a hood for a mysterious mastermind, but what do I know?

I like how these films are gradually becoming more Eurospy. Here, the last film—The Invisible Dr. Mabuse—leads directly into this one. As no one in the U.S. knew who Dr. Mabuse was—or so they say, despite nearly all of the CCC movies coming out here—this was released as The Terror of the Mad Doctor. This time around, Werner Klingler directs.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! includes this movie, an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.

Dr. Mabuse has a new base under a theater, a place that is putting on a play about the French Revolution but really, it’s just a place for dancer Liane Martin (Karin Dor, You Only Live Twice, Assignment Terror) to take a steamy bath. Something for daddy, as they say.

Anyhow, Mabuse wants an invisibility machine and he’ll kill for it. Or at least his new henchmen will, who include Walter Bluhm as a murder clown. Only FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) — Perry’s brother? — can save the day. There’s also a mutated scientist, if you have a Letterboxd list of those.

Released in the U.S. as The Invisible Horror, this was directed by Harald Reinl, who also made Chariots of the Gods, Mysteries of the Gods, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! has this movie, along with an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.

Directed and written by Booker T. Mattison (Twisted Marriage Therapist), this is the tale of the impossibly named Viola January (Christie Leverette). Just out of law school and in a new job, she’s also working a case pro bono to free Will (Derrick J. Smith), a man she believes was wrongly accused of kidnapping a young woman. But the truth is more complicated, and now, the real criminal is after her.

I should have gone to law school, I think, after seeing this. Viola has no idea who the killer is, but somehow gets in the middle of this mess, dragging the police into things and screaming so much — so many screams — until we have numerous people drawing guns, cops in shadowed rooms with guns out and somehow, Viola gets to follow the cops in there.

If I saw this as a kid, the end scene of the dude hiding in the house’s air ducts would have given me nightmares. Also, a shower scene without nudity is bad directing. Also also: That headshot at the end was great.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The second of the 1960s CCC Films Dr. Mabuse film series, this movie follows up Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Gert Fröbe, who plays Inspector Lohmann, was the selling point in the U.S., as he had become known as Goldfinger.

The lawman is called away from his vacation to investigate a series of murders, including an Interpol agent with proof that American organized crime is working with a European crime syndicate, as well as the wife of one of that group’s members, who is killed by a flamethrower in a scene that’s pretty intense seeing as how this was made in 1961.

That woman was carrying Lohmann’s book, The Devil’s Anatomy, which was written by a Reverend Briefenstein of St. Thomas Church. That book has a theory: Satan is a spirit that can take the form of a werewolf, vampire or Dr. Mabuse. Yet, isn’t Dr. Mabuse dead?  A priest informs Lohmann that even though the body can die, a soul can infest the bodies of other men. At that very point, Dr. Mabuse’s voice crackles from the church’s speaker system, demanding that the investigation stop now.

Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) now has an army of zombie criminals that he will use to take anything he wants, including giving these zombies orders to every prisoner in a jail and then sending them to destroy a nuclear power plant.

This movie would be followed by three more: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Scotland Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse and The Secret of Dr. Mabuse. In 1990, Claude Chabrol would bring the character back for his movie Dr. M.

This film’s director, Harald Reinl, also made the krimi The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! has this movie, along with an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC and a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat. You can get it from MVD.