ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Confession time: I never listened to rock band Redd Kross until watching director Andrew Reich’s documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story. After watching it, I’m partially baffled as to why, because they are right up my musical alley, and founding-members brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald share similar tastes with me in 1970s pop culture (from Kiss to The Partridge Family to Linda Blair’s Born Innocent tv movie, for example) and crunchy, catchy guitar-driven rock and roll. It must have been a simple case of “So many bands, so little time.” We pretty much all have examples of that. In short, I’m thankful I found Redd Kross through this high-energy documentary.   

From the brothers McDonald’s days growing up in Hawthorne, California — where their band debuted as school kids when they talked Black Flag into playing with them at a private party — through their early punk days to their most popular phases to their still-going-strong present while being married and raising kids, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story shows that the siblings have lived lives. Reich doesn’t shy away from asking big questions, either, as he brings tough emotions to the McDonald parents regarding Steve’s disappearance as a young teenager, and does the same with the brothers regarding their past drug abuse. Sibling rivalry is on full display, too.

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story isn’t a mere warts-and-all tell-all, though — far from it. It’s a grand celebration of two brothers and their band — including their revolving door of bandmates — who fought against big record labels before being signed by one, who love 1970s kitsch and went against the norms of what fellow musicians and music lovers expected, helmed wonderfully by a longtime fan. 

The talking heads include a who’s who of musicians from acts whose heyday was in the eighties and nineties, former bandmates, friends and relatives, record label folks, and more. Plus, we get trips down 1970s memory lane with clips from The Brady Bunch, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and much more, along with loads of clips from Redd Kross performances, backstage videos, and interviews throughout the years.

Reich’s Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story does exactly what a great documentary should do: make viewers new to the subject want to learn more about it, and give people familiar with the subject information they hadn’t previously known. Thanks to this film, I’m aiming to make up for lost time by cranking Redd Kross albums.   

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story screens as part of the 2024 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 18–28. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

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!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Mama Sue Flay (Trinity The Tuck), Robin Banks (Heidi N Closet), Bella Da Boys (Crystal Methyd), and Olive Wood (Cara Melle) are four drag queens on tour that planned on playing at a famous club, The Bold Tuck, but have accidentally been booked at The Bold Buck, a biker club in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a mistake that any of us could make, right?

They try to make the most of it, as the bartender Dusty (Neil Sandilands) pays them anyway and at least two people show up, probably the only other two LGBTQ+ people for miles, Jax (Donia Kash) and Steven (Gabriel Harry Meltz). As they start their act, Travis (Daniel Janks) starts screaming at them to get off the stage and in all the confusion, another local, Marv (Gustav Rossouw) starts to bite people. Yes, we’re in Bat Country and the film seems like Slither, Feast, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, VFW and From Dusk till Dawn having a few drinks with To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

In no way is that a bad thing, as this movie has style, great lighting, fun special effects and plenty of surprises to dish out.

It’s a movie aware of vampire movie history as well as one that doesn’t make the locals all into bigots and even gives Travis a redemption arc that he never would have had unless he met our heroines and fought vampires with them. The ladies also struggle against in-fighting and realize the love they have for one another.

Also: garlic bread and a sprinkler system make for some amazing weapons. You don’t have to dress like Blade — to call out a great discussion in this film — to be a bad ass vampire killer.

I had a blast watching this. It feels like it needs a bigger audience than just a Tubi Original — not a bad thing, I love these movies after all — and it feels good to see drag queens unite a town and disrupt both vampires and those that are close minded. If only the real world could be the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chris Stokes and Marques Houston have combined to make almost a movie a month on Tubi. From You’re Not Alone, in which the hero watches a masked and gloved killer murder his wife and then come back for his daughter to the mancrush gone bad in The Ex Obsession and three of The Stepmother films, they’ve laid claim to being the most prolific — if not the best — team making Tubi Originals.

Angela (Veronika Bozeman, who was in another Stokes film Still Here) is a CIA agent who loses her husband Jason (Chris Moss) to what she thinks is a heart attack. As she raises her son Jason Jr. (Jered Cheatham at age 12, King Cheatham at age 7) with the platonic support of her agency partner Byron (Lance Gross, the Sleepy Hollow TV show), she finally decides to leave the life behind. That is, until one of her toughest cases comes back and Dmitri Merciano (Charlie Weber), the man who actually killed her husband, many of her fellow agents and nearly murdered her when he discovered that she had been working undercover to get him.

Like so many Tubi Originals, this starts in the middle of the a story (in media res as a better reviewer would tell you) with Bob’s Coffee Shop blowing up real good and nearly killing Angela. There are several big explosions in this, way bigger than you’d expect for the usual budget Stokes and Houston receive.

That explosion would be the second time the main bad guy kills someone she loves, as a bomb wipes out Byron the very day he decides to tell Angela how much he loves her. The bad guys also kill her mother Carolyn (Janet Hubert, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) but not before she goes old lady Arnold on several of them before being killed by a female assassin with a katana.

That said — this movie is pretty fun and it’s nice to see people of color and women represented throughout as total bad asses, good and bad characters included. There’s also a lot of camaraderie between the agents, like a retiring agent named Lisette (Zulay Henao) and Vivian (Annie Ilonzeh), one of Angela’s best friends in the agency who gets caught up in the war between our heroine and her arch enemy. Plus, Malik Yoba from New York Undercover is the leader of the good guys, Director Walker.

There’s also a date scene inside a Bob’s Big Boy and man, I wish we still had those out here. And Stokes shows up at the end as Barry the mailman!

Another victory for this team.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Once available on the Catacomb of Creepshow fifty DVD set — along with a few other Visual Vengeance releases — Torment was directed by Steve Sessions, who also had Aberrations and Contagio released on Tubi by the label.

Laura (Suzi Lorraine) has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital and her husband Ray (Tom Stedham) plans on taking her to their cottage to relax. She has problems, some of them unreal such as seeing dead bodies inside every garbage bag, and some real, which may include a killer clown who goes by the name of Dissecto (Lucien Eisenach).

Ray has stopped believing anything his wife says or sees, so when she claims that a sheriff (Ted Alderman) has stopped by looking for two missing Mormon missionaries (Jade Michael LaFont, Luc Bernier), he thinks it’s all in her psychotic head. But oh no. A killer clown has both those men and we watch as he slowly kills them.

I wish that this movie had more of the is she crazy or being gaslit vibe, as it’s given away way too soon that the clown is a real person. Yet Lorraine is so good in this that she transcends this issue and brings the film up, including some stalking scenes that are incredibly suspenseful in spite of the budget and how it makes the clown’s costume look like it came from the Spirit store.

How weird is it that there are two killer clown movies with the same title? There’s also a 2017 movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

First off — this movie was directed Sam Firstenberg. Yes, the same person who directed Revenge of the Ninja, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Ninja 3: The Domination, Riverbend, American Ninja, American Ninja 2, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, American Samurai and so many more amazing films.

What’s wild is that it was written by Samuel Oldham (who edited Cards of Death) and Edward D. Wood Jr.

Yes, that Ed Wood.

Supposedly, there is footage in this of an uncompleted Wood film, Amazon Women from Space, and it’s worked into new things that Firstenberg shot.

On Firstenberg’s old web site, he said the following:

“One day I got a phone call from my friend, scriptwriter Sam Oldham. The excitement and urgency in his voice told me something was up. I felt right away that this call was going to change things for me. And I was right.

Sam is a devoted, if not fanatic, fan of old sci-fi flicks. VHS, DVD, posters, props, magazines, websites, you name it, he loves it. Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Queen of Outer Space, The Creeping Terror — these are the kinds of movies he lives for. When he called me, he was working at one of the small, dingy, forgotten film vaults that exist all over Hollywood. His job was to check the condition of old negatives and prints stored in rusting tin cans, to see if any were worth saving, and catalog them.

You all know of Ed Wood, director of the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, the man who was crowned the worst director of all time, and immortalized in Tim Burton’s movie. Many people are devoted to his work; he is probably the original cult director, and his name is connected to quite a few tacky Hollywood projects. But for many years, rumors have circulated in Hollywood about one last project Ed Wood started but never finished. He either ran out of money or died before it was finished, depending on who tells the story. Ed Wood was so strange that it is not unlikely that such a film, or part of a film, really exists. The supposed title of the lost film was Amazon Women From Outer Space,  definitely a typical Ed Wood title. No one has come up with any evidence to authenticate the rumors, but nevertheless, they keep resurfacing. Not long ago, however, a lost and forgotten Ed Wood script was found and produced — so you see, miracles can sometimes happen. You can imagine the excitement that would be stirred up if any “lost” Ed Wood footage were discovered today.”

Later, he reveals what was found in those vaults.

“He tells me he’s found some reels of celluloid tucked away on a hard-to-reach, cobweb-covered shelf. After running the film through the viewer, he now strongly believes that he has discovered the lost Amazon Women From Outer Space. “And that’s not all!” he says. “There are script pages too, ten or fifteen of them! They were in a paper bag underneath the film cans! This is impossible, but I’ve got it all right here!” He sounded like he was about to leap right through the phone line. “Yeah, right,” I said. I am notoriously skeptical when it comes to sensational information. On the other hand, Sam’s knowledge of sci-fi films is vast. He can recite 20-minute passages from any old horror or sci-fi flick, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was after midnight, but Sam asked me to come down and look at the footage. I found myself twenty minutes later in a pitch-dark, rat-infested alley off Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, knocking at the back door, and soon we were hunched over the viewer, watching the moving images on the small square glass. I am not an expert on old sci-fi flicks, nor on Ed Wood’s filmography, but it struck me immediately that my friend might be right. The yards and yards of unedited material we viewed were so tacky, so ridiculous, and so incoherent, that they definitely had the Ed Wood touch. The footage was full of Amazon-type women running around in skimpy outfits on cheap spaceship sets. But the cans and boxes were not labeled, and the scenes were not slated, so there was no way to determine whether Sam was right. None of the actresses was even remotely familiar either. And the script pages he mentioned? I turned them over in my hands, fearful that they would crumble to dust right then and there. They seemed to correspond to the film images. We knew we had to contact experts in the area immediately, to help us authenticate, recover, and maybe even restore the remnants of the historic Amazon Women From Outer Space.”

Professor Harvey Kirk (David Rabius, who was also in The Girlfriend from Outer Space, which he probably brought up when he auditioned) is a sex addict whose marriage to Barbara (Barbara Sharp, who also produced this and another Oldham-directed movie, Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy: Fallen Idol) is almost finished. She’s trying to set him up by having her friends come on to him and beyond that, he’s being watched by alien women — several are his students — and then they take him to their planet and start using him to populate the race as otherwise, all they will have is more women.

Michael Dorn — Worf! — is a bartender. Once, I saw him at a convention and someone asked him what he liked about being on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He answered that he was happy that he wasn’t playing a cop after a career of playing police officers like Officer Jebediah Turner on CHiPS. The person asking said, “Worf is a security officer, so you’re still a cop.” He was so sad that he just walked off the stage.

The Amazons in this movie are played by Valentina Chepiga, Elise Muller (who was also in Beach Babes from Beyond), Sherry Goggin (an American Gladiators contestant), Jayne Trcka (she’s the most Amazonian of the Amazons in this), Lauren Powers (well, she’s also pretty big), Cynthia Bridges, Brenda Kelly (who is also in another Oldham movie, Close Encounters of the 4th Kind: Infestation from Mars), Timea Majorova (who was in the movie Bigger, Faster. Stronger with Powers), Nicole Rollolazo, Viviana Soldana, Andrulla Blanchette (her IMDB background says that she is the most successful  female British bodybuilder in the world and the only British bodybuilder to win the Ms. Olympia), Elaine Goodlad, Kat Meyers, Gayle Moher and Lena Johanessen.

Back to that Wood footage. Is it real?

Firstenberg said, “The next few weeks were devoted to running the material by authorities on Ed Wood — film historians, directors, sci-fi buffs, and the hard-core sci-fi B-movie geek crowd. This process proved to be an emotional roller coaster for us, and by the end of it, we felt as if we’d been turned inside-out.  As soon as one expert supported the Ed Wood theory, another would dismiss it as preposterous. Sam and I were nervous wrecks.  Did we have something, or didn’t we?

One of the people we approached was a hard-core sci-fi fan, Dr. Elliott Haimoff, Ph.D. A documentary producer, Elliott was so excited when he heard about our discovery, he immediately insisted on joining us on our mission. We decided that the evidence strongly suggested that the footage was, indeed, Ed Wood material, and as a trio of producer, director, and writer, we resolved to rescue and restore the treasure we had found.”

Later, he specifically refers to the footage by saying, “We had our Ed Wood-type movie — the most hideous, ridiculous, campy, tacky sci-fi we ever saw.  It was one ugly baby, worse than Plan 9 — and we were in love with it. The plan was to give it the right exposure, bring it out to the public so the sci-fi crowd could judge it for themselves. But the product was too short, at 62 minutes, and it had no beginning and no end. It was clear that this movie, which we now officially called Amazon Women From Outer Space, was never completed. As exciting as it was, we all felt unsatisfied. Discussing and debating our predicament, we made the decision to go the extra mile and attempt to extend and complete Amazon Women into a 90-minute full feature, with a beginning, middle, and end. It was too good to neglect. Having in our group a writer, a producer, an editor, and myself a director, we were confident that we could pull it off. Sam Oldham bashed out a script utilizing the original pages, first off.  In the revamped story, the Amazon women from outer space realize they need a male in order to ensure the survival of their species, and find the ideal mate on Earth. They kidnap their chosen male, and the story is off and running. With the male at the center of the new script, the title of the new movie became The Interplanetary Surplus Male and the Amazon Women of Outer Space.”

The film seemingly had major issues with the financial backer, as Firstenberg went on to say that they had no money and “the entire cast and crew stayed on and worked for deferred payment in order to complete the 18-day shoot. Miraculously the filming was completed to my satisfaction, using credit cards and other funds our producer scraped together.”

What they had didn’t match, so more reshoots happened — Firstenberg paying for it all, saying, “I’m looking at my wallet, which seems to be getting skinnier and skinnier!” — and there was a plan to “digitally isolate and colorize some of the backgrounds from the old footage, and composite the actors onto the backgrounds.”

In conclusion, Firstenberg said that he was “Maybe I am now a co-director with Ed Wood on a movie, maybe with someone else. In any event, we ended up with a very funny, very campy, very authentic 50’s-style sci-fi spoof. You will not find any continuity or sanity in it, but when you see it, you will be able to experience our sci-fi discovery.”

There was also an official site that is down now, but you can see it thanks to the Internet Archive. One of the anecdotes on the site says, “As for the rumors regarding the connection with Ed Wood and his lost footage……… “No Comment” at this time.”

Regardless, what emerged is a movie that fits into the SOV era in look. In fact, there are scenes where the director speaks to the actors and it feels like everyone is breaking the fourth wall. Or maybe they didn’t feel like editing it. I’d love to talk to Firstenberg about how this was made.

There are negative reviews of this movie online but I found moments of it fascinating. There are several Star Wars references that are explained by the Amazons that at one point, one of them left their planet and went to Earth because she was in love with a human — Queen of Outer Space — and sold all their secrets to Hollywood. In fact, they say that Star Wars was shot on location and that they have been working with Earth’s governments and filmmakers for years so that they can have breeding stock in exchange for technology.

What a strange and wonderful movie.