If you think the legal system is a mess today, take a trip back to 1970s Palermo, where the line between the badge and the bullet is thinner than a piece of cheap deli ham. Director Damiano Damiani (Amityville II: The Possession) drops us into a world where justice isn’t just blind; she’s been paid off and left in a ditch.

Martin Balsam is Captain Bonavia, a cop who has spent so long staring into the abyss of Sicilian corruption that he’s finally decided to blink. He’s tired of the rules letting the big fish swim free, so he plays a dangerous card: he releases a total nutjob from the asylum just to watch him take a shot at a local construction mogul. When you’re dealing with guys who pave over bodies with concrete, Bonavia figures a little insanity is the only way to get a result.

Ben Gazzara was approached to play this role, but turned it down. Years later, Martin Balsam thanked Gazzara, as the role had given his career a fresh start.

But things don’t go according to plan. Instead of a clean hit, the plan goes south, and now Bonavia has a shadow: Franco Nero. He plays District Attorney Traini, an idealistic young gun who still believes the law actually means something. Balsam is the weary soul who’s seen too much and Nero is the sharp-suited crusader who thinks he can fix it. Their chemistry turns a standard procedural into a psychological warzone.

You can’t talk about this flick without mentioning the score. Riz Ortolani cooks up an innovative mix of jazz, pop and electric guitar that keeps your nerves on edge.

This Radiance Films release has a 2K restoration presented with Italian and English audio options; new interviews with Nero, Michele Gammino, editor Antonio Siciliano and music expert Lovely Jon about Riz Ortolani’s score; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters; a limited edition booklet featuring archival interviews with Damiano Damiani and it’s all presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

If you’re a fan of the kind of cinema that feels like a pressurized steam pipe about to burst, Takashi Miike is your dude. While most directors would be happy finishing one masterpiece in a lifetime, Miike dropped Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q and The Happiness of the Katakuris all in the same year as this movie, a yakuza epic that trades the cartoonish gore of Ichi for a dense, Shakespearean power struggle drenched in sweat and cigarette smoke.

It all kicks off when a yakuza member, played by Miike himself, decides to violently assault a hostess on rival turf. He gets whacked for his trouble, and just like that, the match is dropped into a pool of gasoline. This isn’t just a street fight; it’s a catalyst for a full-scale gang war, as every faction in the city scrambles for a piece of the pie.

Written by Shigenori Takechi (Graveyard of Honor), Agitator isn’t just a shoot-’em-up. It’s a dual-layered look at how the mob actually works: You’ve got the senior figures like Mr. Kaito (played by Hiroki Matsukata, The Rapacious Jailbreaker) doing the backroom maneuvering. These guys treat human lives like chess pieces, playing a slow game of political redistribution. Then you have the low-level soldiers and street-level mobsters who actually have to bleed for the decisions made in those air-conditioned offices. The movie builds toward an inevitable collision where the suits and the tracksuits finally clash in a messy, tragic finale.

For the longest time, we only had the theatrical cut. But Miike doesn’t do brief. This release finally brings the two-part, 200-minute extended version out of the shadows of Japanese VHS obscurity. It’s a sprawling, epic deep dive into the yakuza underworld that demands you sit down, shut up, and watch the world burn.

As one character says, “If life is shit, then why shouldn’t the two of us smash into it as hard as we can?” Any movie that ends with two men driving a stick of dynamite into a building is one I love.

The Radiance Films Blu-ray of Agitator has a high-definition digital transfer of theatrical version and a standard definition transfer of 200 minute extended version of this movie, presented in its original two-part form; a newly filmed interview with Takashi Miike; audio commentary by Tom Mes; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Tom Mes. You can get it from MVD.

You know the story. The dirt-under-the-fingernails kid who looks at the smog-choked horizon and decides he’s going to be the one holding the briefcase instead of the plow. It’s the American Dream, right? Only this is Poland in the wake of WWII, and the ladder is made of socialist bureaucracy, party favors and a soul-crushing urbanization that makes a concrete slab look like a warm blanket.

Grzegorz Królikiewicz (Through and Through) takes the Citizen Kane blueprint, shreds it, and feeds it through a Cold War meat grinder. We follow Michał Toporny, a peasant boy who climbs the social mountain until he’s a high-ranking official. But Królikiewicz isn’t interested in a polite rise and fall biopic. He wants to show you the gears grinding the human spirit into dust.

Cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński (who did the dizzying lens work for the cult slasher Angst) turns every frame into a psychic battlefield. The compositions are so original that they feel like they’re trying to escape the screen. It’s all wide angles and distorted perspectives that make the city feel like a beautiful, sterile prison.

We’re dropped into the life of Michal Toporny (Franciszek Trzeciak), a peasant boy who decides that the mud of the farm isn’t for him. He starts climbing the social ladder of post-war Poland with a speed that would give his ancestors vertigo. But this isn’t a local boy makes good story. Instead, it’s a local boy burns every bridge odyssey.

Michal ditching his rural roots isn’t just about moving to the city. He discards his wife and son like yesterday’s newspaper to marry Wieslawa (Beata Tyszkiewicz), a woman who represents the socially upstanding life he craves. He eventually claws his way to the top of a mining company, but the view from the peak is pretty grim. Wieslawa gets tired of being married to a man who’s more in love with his career than her, leading to an affair with a younger engineer that hits like a cold splash of water.

We fast-forward to Michal not as the young and vital man we have watched, but instead as an old and sick person trying to glue together the shattered pieces of a relationship with the son he abandoned decades ago.

The Dancing Hawk (or Tańczący jastrząb) is a brutal reminder that the higher you fly, the more everything below you starts to look like a target—until you realize you’re the one falling. It’s ambitious, it’s ugly, and it’s essential viewing for anyone who thinks climbing the ladder doesn’t require leaving a few layers of skin behind.

Extras on the Radiance Films Blu-ray, which has a 4K restoration by Filmoteka Narodowa, include an interview with critic Carmen Gray; two short films by cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński; a reversible sleeve featuring original artwork by Jerzy Czerniawski and Andrzej Klimowski; a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Piotr Kletowski and it comes in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip, leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

The Running Man was a troubled production, with original director Andrew Davis (Under Siege, The Fugitive) being replaced a week into filming by former Starsky and Hutch actor Paul Michael Glaser (he’s gone back to acting, but not before giving us the magic that is Kazaam).

In his book, Total Recall, Arnold wrote that this was a horrible decision, as the director “shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes. In fairness, Glaser just didn’t have time to research or think through what the movie had to say about where entertainment and government were heading and what it meant to get to the point where we actually kill people on screen. In TV, they hire you and the next week you shoot, and that’s all they were able to do.”

Written by Steven E. de Souza (who had a hell of a run, writing Commando, 48 Hrs. and the first two Die Hard films, while also adapting Mark Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales for TV as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) from the Richard Bachman book (Bachman was and is, of course, Stephen King, who was using a pseudonym to see if his success was due to talent or luck. A Washington, D.C. book clerk named Steve Brown discovered the truth before an answer could be found. In fact, Bachman’s next book was to be Misery, which became a King novel. The Dark Half, which became a George Romero movie, is based on this experience. In the original book, hero Ben Richards is nothing like the physical description of Arnold, who is near-superheroic.

The film starts with the premise that in 2017 — a time we’re all sadly too familiar with — the U.S. has become a police state after a worldwide economic collapse — perhaps not as close to home, but uncomfortably nearby. Actually, it’s way too fucking close to reality, as the opening text tells us that the “great freedoms of the United States are no longer, as the once great nation has sealed off its borders and become a militarized police state, censoring all film, art, literature, and communications.”

Within two years, the only thing that keeps the populace under control is The Running Man, a game show where convicted felons battle for their lives against the Stalkers, who are presented as pro wrestling/American Gladiators-style stars. Damon Killian (Richard Dawson of TV’s Family Feud and Hogan’s Heroes, as well as one of the first people in the U.S. to own a VCR) hosts the proceedings and remains one of the enduring reasons to enjoy this film. One gets the idea that Dawson was keen to parody his years of hosting game shows, and he cuts through this film, making his role so much better than it deserves to be, whether it’s his ads for Cadre Cola or the way he shits on everyone in his path, even lowly custodians. IMDB states that plenty of folks who worked with Dawson on Family Feud claim he was exactly like this character, but that seems like sour grapes in the form of hearsay. Anyways, worried that ratings may slip, Killian pushes for Ben Richards, the “Butcher of Bakersfield,” (actually, it was all a setup and he was wrongly convicted of killing citizens during a food riot) to be the next runner.

Ben gets caught because instead of staying at a resistance camp — post-prison break, where people’s heads get blown up real good — with fellow escapees Weiss (Yaphet Kotto from Alien and Live and Let Die) and Laughlin, he decides to find his brother. Instead, his brother has been taken in for re-education. In his place is Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonzo, Predator 2, The Lords of Salem), the composer of the music for The Running Man.

Richards takes Amber hostage, but she knees him in the little Arnold, and he’s caught with a big net. Oh yeah — we also meet Mick Fleetwood as a resistance leader here. Remember how I said he played himself? Here’s my evidence. He states that the government has “burned my music,” and his second-in-command is named Stevie, after Fleetwood Mac band member and former flame Stevie Nicks (but is played by Dweezil Zappa, who is also in Pretty in Pink and Jack Frost). In exchange for Killian not putting his friends into the game, Richards enters the contest, only to learn that it’s all a lie and they’ll all be part of The Running Man.

The game begins and immediately, Richards does something that’s never been done. No Runner has ever killed a Stalker, but he bests and kills Subzero (former pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka, who played just about every Asian henchman ever. He’s the butler in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, he’s one of the heavies in The Last Action Hero, he’s Rushmore in 3 Ninjas and his IMDb filmography has many roles that simply list him as “sumo wrestler” or “bodyguard.”).

Meanwhile, Amber learns from the news that the media’s presented truth does not line up with her memories — Richards is accused of killing numerous people whom she did not see him murder. Her detective work gets her caught and now, she’s on the show.

Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch, Arnold the Barbarian from House 2) kills Laughlin before Richards dispatches him. Dynamo (played by Erland van Lidth, a classically trained baritone opera singer, who is actually singing the aria that introduces himself), another Stalker, kills Weiss before Richards flips his buggy, trapping him. However, Richards refuses to kill him, which increases his popularity. As the downtrodden people of the U.S. regularly bet on the game, they suddenly stop betting on the Stalkers and bet on a Runner for the first time — to the anger of Killian.

Killian offers Richards a Stalker role, but Richards turns it down. In retaliation, he sends Fireball, one of the most famous Stalkers, after Ben and Amber. He’s played by Jim Brown, who knows about the world of blood and circuses, seeing as how he is a former NFL football star. Plus. he was also in The Dirty Dozen and Mars Attacks! Fireball’s pursuit takes them into an abandoned factory where they find the charred remains of past winners — all lies, as they were really killed by Fireball, who is killed by his own weapon.

Totally losing his mind, Killian wants to send the game’s biggest star, Captain Freedom (Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Predator), to take on Richards. Freedom refuses, so the show creates a CGI version of reality in which Captain Freedom wins by killing Richards and Amber.

Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood finds our stars and helps them get into the control room, where Amber kills Dynamo and Richards reveals the truth. Killian begs for his life, as all he was doing was giving the people what they wanted — death and chaos. Ben refuses, sending Killian into the game zone, where his rocket sled hits a Cadre Cola billboard and explodes.  Boom — a happy ending, as Ben and Amber romantically walk into the sunset, until you realize that their victory has changed absolutely nothing and society will just keep on being the same exact way.

Remember when I said this movie hasn’t aged well? I’d argue that it looks worse than the much smaller-budgeted Warriors of the Year 2072. The costumes look cheap, the video screens look sadly composited, and everything feels woefully low-budget for a film that cost $27 million dollars to make.

And what of the claim that this film’s post-apocalyptic future is better than our own? One only has to watch the scene where Richards is caught at the airport. Today’s post 9/11 security checkpoints are way worse than anything the hero of this film encounters — he’s never frisked and the tourists freely walk onto the tarmac of the airport, just like folks once could.

Honestly, director Glaser was in well over his head. If a director like Paul Verhoeven was at the helm — like Arnold’s Total Recall — the sheer ridiculous nature of a game show controlling the world could have really been a winner. As it stands here, this is a fun film that makes you wish that it could be so much more — kind of like eating Buffalo wing flavored chips and wishing that they were really Buffalo wings.

In truth, life imitated art in this film, as it inspired the aforementioned American Gladiators and the dance routines were choreographed by future reality game show hostess Paula Abdul.  And the Adidas-sponsored costumes of the Runners hint at the days when everything would have a branded logo.

You can get The Running Man from Deep Discount.

The Slime People (1963): There’s so much fog in this movie that Lucio Fulci got jealous.

There was so much fog that the Elizabeth Dane wrecked.

So much fog…

You get it, right?

A bunch of lizard people emerge from under Los Angeles and use their fog machine to invade the city because, well, we nuked them out of their homes. Luckily, Tom Gregory (Robert Hutton, who also directed the movie) joins a group of survivors to battle the slimy reptiles, who can’t handle salt or their own spears.

Susan Hart — who would one day marry American-International Pictures president James H. Nicholson and appear in their beach movies — is one of the humans battling the mucky scaly heels.

This entire movie was filmed at KTLA studios, but ran out of money after nine days. The slime creatures cost most of the money, and neither the stuntmen nor Hutton got paid. There was also the wild thought of using small people as giant voles to lead the invasion, but when they watched the footage, it seemed too silly to use. Just think of that, as this movie is one of the goofiest films ever made. I wish I could watch that footage.

Hutton would go on to write Persecution, which was one of Lana Turner’s last films. It’s just as goofy — maybe more — than this one.

The Crawling Hand (1963): If an astronaut crash-lands and says things like, “My hand… makes me do things…. kill…. kill!” At this point, you may say that this is not a lack of oxygen in the astronaut’s helmet, but rather a medical issue.

There’s also a medical student named Paul (Rod Lauren was a singer who released the song “If I Had a Girl” before acting; he moved to the Philippines, where he married actress Nida Blanca. He became the lead suspect in her death when she was stabbed in a parking garage, then fought extradition back to the country for years before jumping off a hotel room balcony; sorry to bring everyone down with who Paul really was), who finds the astronaut’s hand and well, keeps it. Because that’s what doctors do: keep desiccated hands that they see from space crashes.

Paul begins to use the power of his hand to attack people he dislikes, becoming increasingly obsessed with it. The police — led by The Skipper Alan Hale Jr. — try to catch him, and the space agency starts to realize that the fingerprints of the dead astronaut are all over the place. So Paul takes the hand to the beach and tries to destroy it, and some cats try to eat it, because that’s the kind of movie The Crawling Hand is.

Somehow, writer Rick Moody used this film as inspiration for his novel Four Fingers of Death, the tale of writer Montese Crandall, who attempts to get over the death of his wife by throwing himself into his work and writing a remake of The Crawling Hand.

Director Herbert L. Strock also directed Gog and The Devil’s Messenger, and one of the co-writers was Joe Cranston, Bryan’s father. None of them noticed that, at times, the crawling hand is a left hand and at other times a right hand.

Extras include a The Slime People commentary track by Tom Weaver, OG Monster Kid! and film historian; commentary for The Crawling Hand by Rob Kelly, artist, reviewer, podcaster and film buff extraordinaire; a featurette exploring 1950’s and 60’s sci-fi movies; a two-sided sleeve with art by Robert Kelly and retro artwork on the flipside; a collectible booklet on the creative minds behind these two films; a limited edition slipcase and a classic drive-in sci-fi poster gallery. You can get it from MVD.

I’ve never seen any of the movies that director and writer Les Sekely has made like Night of the Living Date, The Not-So-Grim Reaper and The Alien Conspiracy: Grey Skies, but I have seen this and I totally am hunting for the rest.

This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images and a ghost man in a closet and vampires who can move through the timestream and random muscicvideo sequences where people are encouraged to “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Most of the other reviews I’ve read for this film are either beyond angry that they endured it, wondering whether or not the humor was intentional or not, or nearly shut it off but stuck with it and still aren’t sure what they have seen.

As you can imagine, these are the movies that obsess me.

Natalie is a vampire who was killed by Buffy — yes, this is intended to be a reference — which has her call to her sister Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) from beyond the grave and demand revenge by killing Buffy’s sister Sue Anne Marie (J.J. Rodgers) and her fellow pledges to the Alpha Omega sorority. One of them is a talented guitar player — she can play “Eruption” seemingly without fingertapping and sleeps with her axe — who has The Man Who Never Calls Back (the director!) on speed dial, hoping to sign to his label and escape college. Another is a nerdy girl named Jenna (Micky Levy). There’s also another who is impossibly tall.

There’s also a Hooded Man who gets some kids to go to the Old Crenshaw Place, where Lorelei has been trapped in a coffin for five years. They’re promised porn magazines and instead of looking in the woods like every other kid in the 80s and 90s did, they find a coffin and a vampire who comes back but isn’t strong enough to bite necks any longer so she must “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Like I said, some folks are going to watch this and see the budget and that it doesn’t look like movies do today — come on, people — and dismiss it. For others, they will savor moments like when a vampire goes up in flames and says the last line from Ms. 45. “Sister!”

I found an interview with Sekely online about this movie and it notes that he also composed the movie for this and considered it his baby. Of the film, he said, “Vampire Time Travelers, in one word, is … fun. A little scary, mostly campy, and even slightly sexy … fun. (We didn’t have the budget to be serious). It’s Woody Allen meets Stephen King … meets MTV. To sum it up … You know when you have a dream, it’s a bunch of strange scenes and events, one after another, that are not connected. Well, Vampire Time Travelers is a lot like that … except the events are connected. Basically … go with it!”

I Know What You Did in English Class (2000): Directed and written by Les Sekely (Vampire Time Travelers), this is similar to that film and this quote that I used to describe that one is even more accurate: “This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images…” If I say Party Doll-A-Go-Go and you get it, you’re a pervert, and we should be friends, and you’ll know exactly what kind of strange editing and barrage of sound effects and dumb jokes that entails.

Years ago, students destroyed the life of their teacher. Most of them got over it, but only one still feels some empathy and wonders what happened to her, perhaps because his girlfriend is also a teacher. Yes, you now get that this is not a rip-off of I Know What You Did Last Summer, except for being close to the title.

I can see that as a movie that would anger many viewers, as it doesn’t even let up with being silly, even when it’s trying to be heartfelt. The sound effects, if anything, get louder and more repetitive, kind of like Max Headroom repeating himself. It was something in the way 90s and 00s movies could be edited and doesn’t seem to have survived until today. Yet here’s this film, rescued by Visual Vengeance, a little shot in Lakewood, OH effort about demons, classroom hijinks and the regret of growing up, mixed with male gaze rear-end shots and a Troma-like sensibility without nudity. I haven’t seen many movies like it, so you should try it at least.

Extras include commentary with director Les Sekely; interviews with Sekely, JJ Rodgers, Angelia Scott interview, Director of Photography Dennis Devine and Assistant Director Steve Jarvis; Not So Grim Reaper short; Visual Vengeance trailers; a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set;  I Know What You Did In English Class with commentary by director Les Sekely; a reversible sleeve featuring new I Know What You Did In English Class art and a folded mini-poster. You can get this from MVD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Full disclosure: I LOVE films where animals attack. The notion of a chimp in a sweater with an ipad who goes on a murderous rampage/ piqued my interest immediate. 

I was pleasantly surprised that a movie like this was made and released in the modern era.  

Primate offers viewers a well-executed simple premise. Cujo with a chimp. That’s pretty much it. The characters are secondary to the action. Forget that there’s no rabies in Hawaii, where the film takes place. It doesn’t matter. It’s enough to know that a mongoose got into poor Ben’s enclosure and bit him. The “whys” and “hows” aren’t important when fighting off a rabid ape with the strength of 3 Chuck Norrises. 

Most impressive are the film’s practical effects. That’s not a CGI chimp. It’s an actor in a full body suit. The kills are insanely creative, bringing to the screen what happened in real life when a chimp named Travis went rogue and ripped off Charla Nash’s jaw with his bare hands because he didn’t like her new hairstyle or her new Tickle Me Elmo Doll. Lest we forget Buddy and Ollie, who attacked a couple when they brought a birthday cake for their own chimp, Moe who shared space with Buddy and Ollie in an animal sanctuary in California. No cake? No face. Those are the rules. 

This movie takes what we, the audience, have read about in the news and pictured in our minds for decades and renders it in silicone and spirit gum glory. Although the film feels a bit slow at times, the scenes where Ben the sign-language chimp intimidates his victims made me genuinely uncomfortable. If you’ve ever stared into the eyes of a chimp up close with no bars in between you, as I have, you’ll know what I mean. They look through you. I once saw one sitting in a makeup chair getting his hair done for a TV show. He looked at me as I passed by his dressing room as if to say, “Where’s my skinny oat latte, Bitch?” Later, that same chimp got into the passenger seat of an Audi in the parking lot and put on his own seatbelt. They are us. They are remarkable and marvelous creatures capable of great acts of violence. Add rabies to the mix and an isolated location with an infinity pool, a bunch of young people and a deaf best-selling author dad and you’ve got a decent movie. I loved Ben. None of it was his fault. A sympathetic monster, to be sure. 

Are there other horror tropes we’ve seen a million times before? Yes. But the reason horror tropes exist is because they work. The direction is solid and the overall production design of the house reminded me a bit of the super-modern architecture in Tenebrae even if the lighting is a bit dark. 

Speaking of Argento…the kill scene where the girl buys it in the SUV was shot and scored just like an Argento film. Other musical cues sounded reminiscent of Escape From New York. In another scene, a guy lands on his head at the bottom of a cliff. There are plenty of, “Ohhhh” moments for the gorehounds to latch onto. 

I wish Ben had endured a more spectacular demise at the end of the film, but overall, I enjoyed it. If Primate had come out in the ‘80s, I would have watched it a million times along with Monkey Shines and Phenomena. Inga is still my favorite chimp in a horror movie. MONKEY JUSTICE!!!!

The Paramount Blu-ray release has a commentary track from director/writer Johannes Roberts and producer Walter Hamada and features of the making of the movie. You can order it from Deep Discount.