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.

Greg Salman has only directed one other movie, Adventures In Pornoland, but after watching Mad Dawg, I’m going to check that out after this and not just because Veronica Hart is in it.

With the main character named Mac (Lamik Blake) and his wife called Lady Mac (Lunden De’Leon), it’s kind of obvious that this is blacksploitation take on Macbeth. Yet it works. There’s one really intense scene where Mac has finally risen up and started a series of bloody killings and his lover has to clean the blood from him in the bath as he just stares into nothingness, overwhelmed by what he’s done. Not what you expect for a low budget gangster movie.

This feels dark and bloody and rough in the best of ways. Lived in, if you will. It’s totally unexpected and I want to go back and live through it again.

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.

Bret McCormick is someone whose movies must be allowed to wash over you. Like this one, which starts with an explanation of what a Bio Tech Warrior is, a “military product of the secret government is intended for use as a policeman, to prevent any insurrection among the citizens in the coming new regime” and something that has been created with pieces and parts of the grey ones.

Sure, it’s a home made costume that looks to combine pieces of BMX gear, a SCUBA suit and some paint, but who cares? When you start with an explanation like that and make a downbeat 90s cyberpunk movie that really wants to be a 60s science gone wrong warning movie, you cannot be wrong or bored.

You just know that if the government made a robot cop for its shadow killing, it would live on human blood.

There’s only one other review of this movie on IMDB and it makes me sad because of how it talks about this movie. They seem angry that they watched it instead of approaching this with the love and wonder that it deserves. Free your mind, my friend.

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.

John and Mark Polonia made a slasher with giallo POV moments in which Def Jam comedians are being killed and they’re all friends of Hollaback (Mike Troy Smith), whose career has been ruined by his act and now is getting threatening phone calls.

Just read that sentence again. That’s all you need to know. The idea that this even exists is why I have this website.

Comedians Brooklyn Mike, Kenny Williams, Rob Stapleton, F.O.B, Harris, Mike Yard, Wil Sylvince, Arnold Acevedo, Brad Lowery, Jay Phillips, Kareem,  Jerry Ford are all in this, as well as man on the street style interviews that set up the movie’s premise of dying on stage when you bomb and having to face off with the audience who is there to potentially ruin your act by booing you.

This has some solid gore despite how basement level the budget was but you know, I kind of love that someone decided to make a black comedy slasher. Who would have come up with that?

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.

This was directed by Steve Lustgarten, who won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Student Film. When you read the plot — “Unstable thirty-something introvert, who works as a photographer’s assistant, becomes obsessed with his underage female neighbor” — you might think that this is going to be exploitative. It’s not. Instead it comes across as completely real even if we’d never make the decisions that the characters live through.

Written by Lustgarten and his leads, Jay Horenstein (who plays Paul) and Nicole Harrison (who plays Lisa), this movie feels like we’re looking at actual lives. Sadly, American Taboo was the only movie Harrison made during a time that she said that she was “a poet from the Northwest who joyously misspent her youth in Hollywood.” Even more depressing is the fact that she died in 2011 from brain cancer. She feels like someone who could have broken through in some way to be a star.

You can see this as troublesome and wish fulfillment because the young girl is the aggressor in this movie, but it’s also so well made that I didn’t come away feeling strange or grossed out by it. Paul seems like someone who can’t connect with anyone and so when he does feel something with Lisa, it does seem like something that is only happening in his head even if it is the reality within the movie. He feels regret because he sees this as something that he could have kept from doing but Lisa is more of a realistic person, knowing that she wanted it and that it seemed like it was happening regardless of whatever front of morality Paul had erected.

What a strange film to be in the Visual Vengeance library of movies.

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.

Imani (Shatara Curry) has a boyfriend she’s putting through college while she works a job and is in school herself. After giving everything to her man, she feels like he doesn’t care, so after advice from her girlfriends — who are all getting abortions at the same time from the same doctor — she gets rid of him and goes to the club, where she meets Flip (Esteban Lastra) who takes her away for the weekend.

The problem is one of his friends watches her ex grab her behind and they assume she’s a gold digger. She’s drugged and assaulted several times, including after they leave by a hotel worker who she follows and murders. She finds herself hunting down all of the men who raped her before realizing that she may never run out of victims.

This is a movie that somehow combines live performances of spoken word with an abortion and a castration. It’s intense and at the same time quite cheap in the best possible sense of the word, feeling real and messy and I love that. Directed by Roderick Giles and written by Jeff Carroll (Holla If I Kill You), it’s in no way perfect but who needs that? It’s instead a film that looks at the war between the sexes and responds with bullets to the head and knives to dicks.

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 watched two of Steve Lustgarten’s movies — this and American Taboo — and I’m really surprised by his directing and writing. Both films seemed like stories I’d have no interest in and they each got me, watching on the edge of my seat.

Kyle Lockwood (Tim Vandeberghe) left town as soon as he could but now he’s back. Maybe Los Angeles didn’t work out like he wanted it to, but then again, the Nebraska small town of his past hasn’t fared that well either. The farmers are pretty much stuck growing marijuana thanks to a predatory drug lord who just so happens to be married to the girl that got away from Kyle.

Some people are happy to have him back home. The cops sure aren’t. They’re reminded of chasing him not all that long ago, him blowing their cars off the dirt trails that act as roads and getting away with it. They aren’t all that thrilled with him being back in town or disrupting the shadow world of cops making money off drugs they’ve enjoyed the last few years. The town has given up its soul and now the black sheep is back to try to pull it out of its thrall.

It’d be any other action movie but you care so much about each character that it just works. John Durbin, who plays main villain Gene Lynch, is so just plain detestable that you want to see everyone succeed. He gets the best exit I’ve seen in some time.

I really enjoyed the time I spent with the people in this movie. They feel real and I cared about what happened to them. How many films can say that?

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.

Ninea Ranks (Keya Smith) entered her life of crime when her man took her on drug deal that fell apart, She hot a man, he went to jail for her where he died and she’s looking for revenge as she leads an all-girl gang made up of T (Tamura Gaston) and Glitter (Dawn Jones).

She’s been going ip against Dion (Tyrone King), who has his own issues with his men Razor (Lewis DaCosta III) and Curtis (Khalid Williams).

This is the kind of movie where every actor was also behind the camera at some point and that it’s mostly the passion project of its director and writer, Randy Williams. It’s taking the 90s gang movie and doing it on the smallest of budgets with a camera that betrays its 1998 origins. And I love it for that. I imagine most of the budget went to Ninea’s wigs, of which there are many.

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.

Directed and written by Steve Sessions (Aberrations, Dead Clowns), Contagio starts with Calvin (Luc Bernier) and Iris (Isabelle Stephen) going on a camping weekend vacation and then entering a nightmare, as they soon learn that the area that they’re in has seen people going insane.

Filmed in less than a week during the beginning of March 2009, this is the kind of movie that references The Incubus (the car that Calvin and Iris steal has the same license plate as Cassavettes’ car), The Crazies and Night of the Demon (the sheriff’s name is from that film). I’m kind of surprised by the level of people not liking this movie on IMDB and Letterboxd, because it has some great effects — I mean, a man literally pulls his own head in half and everything inside messily vomits out — and is obviously made with no budget at all. Sure, Calvin and Iris are both morons — I judged him as soon as he wore that driving hat and wondered how he was able to have such an attractive partner — but what horror movie leads are all that smart anyway?

Yes, I also get that the leg wound that Iris gets would leave her unable to walk. Yes, the footage of the helicopters is obviously stock and doesn’t feel like it fits where the movie takes place. Yes, Calvin may be a complete moron until he suddenly is an expert in science and figures out that there’s a cloud that goes into people’s eyes and makes them into infected killers.

That said, I had fun. Sometimes, you can just watch something and shut your brain off, you know?

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 these movies on Tubi: Blood of the Chupacabras and Revenge of the Chupacabras. You can read an interview with the director here and get this on blu ray from Diabolik DVD.

Visual Vengeance has brought back two Blockbuster Video shelf favorites, both concerning the infernal Mexican goatsucker known as el chupacabra! In the book Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, these films are credited with starting the trend in movies about the chupacabras.

Blood of the Chupacabras (2003): If you read any reviews that came out on this movie’s original release, they all decry the fact that the poster and cover art are so amazing and the actual monster is not. But you know, that’s part of the charm in director and writer Jonathan Mumm’s movie (he also edited and composed some of the music).

The town that this takes place in has near Andy Milligan level supernatural coincidences: there’s a witch. There’s an old vampire hunter. There’s a singer. There’s an old prospector! And yes, there’s a chupacabra controlling possessed townsfolk from within a cave.

There are so many people in this town and let me tell you, I kind of love that the majority of this movie is people arguing over rent and trying to figure out how to survive in their downtrodden lives and then realizing, “Oh yeah. There’s a monster that kills goats in a cave.” That’s how real life is. You know that there are so many evil creatures in the woods outside of town but you live in a capitalist society and the cogs of the military-industrial complex are greased in the blood of the working man.

In addition to all of those characters — seriously, if you missed meeting new people in the new COVID era, get ready to meet so many people and then meet some more people — this movie has a synth score that in no way tries to sound real. You may be too young to remember organ stores in the mall and the poor souls that worked there that had to non-stop play synth and organ ditties while we shopped around them. Who were these people buying these gigantic organs? Where was the budget to hire so many people to play them? Where did they all go?

I digress.

I love when people review this movie and say it has so much talking. Yes, it’s a 1950s drive-in movie with no budget shot on video (with some 16mm from the first pass at making it) with rubber suits, early CGI and untrained actors. Revel in it. Soak it up. We should all be so lucky to live in a world that this movie exists and we do.

Revenge of the Chupcacabras (2005): 

Just look at that image of a humanoid chupacabra and remember 2005, a time when life was much, much simpler than today and we had no idea. We could still rent movies in stores. And yeah, things are probably more convenient today, but we also had movies with chupacabras. Two in a row, no less, from Jonathan Mumm, who directed and wrote this.

You know what’s really crazy? This movie isn’t even about a chupacabra. It’s about a kidnapping. A chupacabra shows up — and it looks better than the first movie because people whined that they got a cool looking poster and that monster wasn’t in the movie and have you people never watched an exploitation movie before?!? — but this is really about a kidnapping. I am all for the bait and switch, folks.

Also in 2005, you could kidnap an attractive college student and ask for $2 million and no one laughed at you. Today, we don’t believe in science so we would just giggle and try and negotiate the ransom.

This movie makes me want to love it and as such has a scene where a priest investigates the possessions going on in this small town and gets killed by a chupacabra and honestly, that’s all I want movies to be about.

The tagline is “It can smell your fear.” Can it also smell how happy I am to look over and see this movie on my shelf and be so happy that I own it, much less the gorgeous Visual Vengeance blu ray? You got me goat killer!