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!
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. You can get this on blu ray from MVD.
In the small town of Copperton, Ohio, Paul Henson (Dino Tripodis), a former big-city journalist, buys a small local newspaper. He quickly falls into a wide-reaching conspiracy of ritualistic199 murder and cult mind control when he discovers that the entire town may be under the spell of Reverend Donovan (Nick Baldasare, Beyond Dream’s Door), Reverend Kane (John Dunleavy) and their flock. As the clues and corpses pile up, Henson and his family are thrust into a life-or-death struggle to expose the truth and stop the demonic cabal’s reign of evil.
Shot in 1989 by director Eric Swelstad on 16mm film and lost in obscurity and distribution false starts for over 30 years, Heartland of Darkness finally arrives on home video for the very first time and is packed with bonus features that spotlight the original creators and document the film’s long history and final completion.
Filmed as Fallen Angels, which was changed to Blood Church and then Heartland of Darkness, Swelstad abandoned the project before finding a distributor. Over the years various producers including Jim Wynorski, Rob Spera and Jody Savin wanted to release the film, but nothing happened. It almost came out from Media Blasters in 2004 before Visual Vengeance became the company to finish it and get it out into the world.
If that doesn’t sell you, Linnea Quigley plays an evil teacher.
I have no idea why this ever got lost. It’s a perfect early 90s direct to video horror film, but perhaps even better than the other movies you would have found on the shelf. Swlstad has a great eye for filmmaking and puts story over simple gore.
BONUS: I had the chance to speak with director Eric Swelstad about this film and his career.
B&S About Movies: This movie has been gestating for decades, right?
Eric Swelstad: It sure has. The original film was shot as Fallen Angels back in 1989, we ran out of money to finish it. At the time, the distributor in Florida named it Blood Church. And for a long time it had that name, but they also didn’t have the money to finish it. So for a long time, it sat on a literal shelf, waiting to be finished. And then finally, after the last couple of years, we want to get the money together to finish it and we were happy that Visual Vengeance made an offer to release it.
B&S: What do you think of what they did with your movie?
Eric: I think it’s terrific. I was telling Rob that I think his line is like the Criterion of, of, you know, genre releases. It’s really great. The packaging is terrific. The special features are great. There are three commentary track and a behind the scenes documentary that we made, as well as a bunch of other goodies that people can get.
B&S: You’re from Ohio, correct?
Eric: I grew up in both Indiana and Ohio. I went to college at Ohio State University where this was actually a master’s thesis for myself and my cinematographer. So great memories and great times at Ohio State.
B&S: You’re also part of another OSU student film, Beyond Dream’s Door, right?
Eric: Exactly. I was one of the ADs on that film. It was a great experience. So that was how I learned about making a feature at the university and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I’m going to try to do this as well for my Master’s.” And we were able to pull it off.
B&S: I love that both of those movies came out of OSU. They don’t feel like anything else on the shelves at the time.
Eric: Exactly. Yeah, they’re a little bit unique. And of course, some of the same actors like Nick Baldasare and John Dunleavy are in both films. And, of course, our movie was made at the height of the Satanic Panic in the late 80s. So we were capitalizing on what was going on in the country at the time. And it was on the news all the time. We capitalized on that. I came up with the idea for the script. And I said, “Man, this would be a great topic to deal with. made it an action film.”
You know, it’s like a horror action film.
B&S: Were you a horror fan before you made this?
Eric: I was a horror fan. I was more into like movies like Halloween and The Exorcist. You know, I was bmore into those films than I was into stuff like Italian giallo cinema. But I certainly was more into the occult. The Omen was a big influence. Films like that where you’re kind of like thinking, okay, these are ordinary people, but this crazy scary stuff is happening to them. That was what was interesting to me. And then, of course, I love action films. So I incorporated that into the action aspect of this to make it what I call an action horror film.
B&S: What were your influences on this?
Eric: I was heavily influenced by the usual suspects. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin. Coppola, of course, was a huge influence. You know, there were just so many. John Carpenter. I just looked I finally got to meet him a few years ago and I told him just how important Halloween and Escape from New York were to me. I mean, all those great, great films, and I know he’s heard it a hundred times before, but he was so nice. I also recently met Walter Hill. One of my favorites. Yeah, my favorite directors from the 70s and 80s. And I told him, I teach a class about theology in film and we screened The Warriors as an example of Greek mythology and he was tickled by that.
B&S: What do you do today?
Eric: I’m the head of the film department at Valley College in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley and love it. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years now. And it’s been great. In fact, I hired some of my students to do some work on this film on Heartland of Darkness. They helped sound with the mix and one of my top students, she produced the documentary Deeper Into the Darkness, which is the behind the scenes movie. It was great having my students work on the main show.
B&S: What’s it like seeing young students being at where you were when you made this movie?
Eric: It’s so inspiring because I give them all these warnings about what not to do, because I went through it and the biggest one I tell them is don’t make a feature film if you can’t finish it. Don’t run out of money like we did. The things that we messed up on this movie are great lessons for today. I mean, things ranging from direction to editing, a whole bunch of stuff. So I think if anything, I just enjoy sharing experiences with the students to let them know what worked for us and what didn’t work for us.
B&S: I love the films that Visual Vengeance is putting out because they’re all so original. And even though the technology to make movies is more available and it should be so much more democratic to shoot a movie today, you don’t see the same drive.
Eric: The tools to make low budget films are there and it’s great. And you know, you could literally could go out and make your own feature film on your cell phone, which is wonderful. But you’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to have something to say. There are so many films that never see the light of day because they’re not that good. And there’s a reason for that. If you’re going to pour your heart and soul into something, you want it to be really good. You don’t want to be like something they would find any every other day. And it just you know, I teach screenwriting, so I talk about, it’s all about the story. It’s all about the script. You’ve got to have a really interesting story to begin and a lot of horror films today. I’m not really into because so many movies today are built around the jumpscare. How many jumpscare should we have in this film? Where the jumpscare is going to be? And that’s just a cliche. Anybody can do a jumpscare! You can put a sheet over your head and jump out at somebody and that’s a jumpscare. But it needs a story. It needs characters that we care about and follow.
B&S: I hate when people say, “Well, Val Lewton’s movies had jumpscares.” Well, they also had stories.
Eric: The great directors that we think of, you know, they didn’t just jump stuff out. They actually had stories. One of my mentors was the late great Robert Wise. He directed a lot of great movies, one of my favorite horror films he did was called The Haunting. That movie is so scary because of sound. It’s what you don’t see that is scary. And the sound is so good in that film and other films like that too. We can all learn from those master filmmakers about how to do horror films.
You’ve got to have a great script. I mean, that was a great script. The remakes that have come out have suffered because they were all about the technical stuff, the jumpscares and they really weren’t about the story. So if you spend time on the story, you’re gonna nail it. You’re gonna get a really cool film, but it’s all about the story. You’ve got to go back and think about character, plot development, character arc. The third act is critical. So all those things may add up to a really good movie.
B&S: I keep getting fooled by the A24-style horror movies that have a great trailer and a not-so-great final film.
Eric: They run out of steam. They delivered it on the first and second act, but by the ending, they’re like, “Oh, we already showed all that stuff. Let’s just wrap it up.”
Look at something like John Carpenter’s Halloween. To really know how to just do a great payoff, he had such a great ending and great characters. Now that’s a good example of how to end a movie. The Exorcist is like that as well. You’ve got the stick the landing.
Imagine if The Omen petered out before the ending.
B&S: Do you advise to start with that ending?
Eric: If you start backward, you know, you can come up with a really good ending and you work backward. That can sometimes work but you got to have a really, really good ending that we don’t see coming. I tell my students, “Twist endings are great. You’ve got to build to them. You got to have a great delivery, but you got to have stuff before that.”
You can do a good twist today. All movies need to have a twist. You’ve got to have something we don’t see coming. Otherwise, no one’s gonna make it.
B&S: What has worked for you lately?
Eric: I really liked It Follows. A lot of it is shot like Halloween, with the stuff shot during daylight and I love that they did really creepy things shot during broad daylight.
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. You can read an interview with the director here and get this on blu ray from MVD.
Just the name L.A. AIDS Jabber is going to offend you or make you want to see this or perhaps even both. Originally released as Jabber in the 90s in the most limited of releases — in the thousands and all self-distributed by creator Drew Godderis — this is the story of Jeff (Jason Majik) and what happens when he finds out that the illness that he’s been feeling could very well be a death sentence.
1994 is a very different place than 2022, but then again, is it so different? We’re still dealing with a pandemic that has been politicized, except that when AIDS was unleashed, it was originally thought to be some form of cancer that only impacted homosexual men (shades of the media as monkeypox became this year’s illness) and any stories of straight men or women didn’t appear on the news.
So when Jeff finds out from his doctor that he has HIV, the disease that causes AIDS, he’s certain that this is the end of his world. Then why shouldn’t it be the end of the world for everyone he can take down along the way?
Jeff gets the bright idea to start filing his blood into syringes and tracking down everyone who wronged him, then injecting them with his infernal hemoglobin. And thus we have a shot on video movie — by necessity, as you can learn in my exclusive interview with Drew — that is filled with shock upon shock.
The thing that’s most astounding about this movie is that despite being SOV it doesn’t seem like a low end production. Yeah, it’s sleazy — would you expect a movie with this title to be any other way? — but it also explores the life of the cops on the case as well as what drove Jeff to go for broke. And man, the soundtrack! It sounds amazing!
Back in 2000, Snopesexplored the urban legend that drug addicts were placing their used, HIV-infused needles into pay phone coin slots in order to infect others, as well as another story about AIDS terrorists leaving HIV needles in movie theater seats. Yeah whatever, crazy people of the world. L.A. AIDS Jabber got there first. And of course, it did it better.
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 don’t want to jinx it, but every time I think that I am running out of movies that blow my mind with how unhinged they are, I discover something new. Usually, those grubby film highs come from Italy or Turkey or from the early 70’s, but man, Beyond Dreams Door was made at the end of the 80’s and comes from Ohio of all places.
Made with the cinema school at The Ohio State University, this is a film all about Ben, who stopped dreaming once his parents died when he was 9. Now, the dreams are coming for him, a fact he learns from the dream version of himself who warns:
“Beyond dream’s door is where horror lies,
Where love may sleep with sorrow’d eyes,
Where demons wait to greet the ones,
Who dare not reach its darkened shores,
Beyond dream’s door tomorrow dies.*”
As low as the budget for this film may be, its concept is high. Somehow, this also looks like anything but a movie made for thousands of dollars. It’s slick as hell and certainly doesn’t seem like director Jay Woelfel’s first movie. In fact, I saw Art of the Dead a few years back and recognized that he edited it. I’m glad he’s still working, whether that means composing music, writing films and even acting.
Imagine a movie as hard to explain as Phantasm with — amazingly — less of a budget. That’s what you’ve got here. And it’s exactly as great as you’d hope.
*Thanks to the astounding Bleeding Skull for writing that poem out.
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 and get the blu ray from MVD. You can also read an interview with the director here.
“Moonchild, hear the mandrake scream Moonchild, open the seventh seal Moonchild, you’ll be mine soon child Moonchild, take my hand tonight!”
Yeah, any movie inspired by Iron Maiden — it says so right in the credits — deserves all of your money.
Directed and written by Todd Sheets, Moonchild is a movie that realizes that the best post-apoclyptic movies didn’t need huge budgets, just sets that looked like the end of the world, some wildness to set them apart and all the heart you can muster. More 2019: After the Fall of New York, less Children of Men.
Also, you can sum up this movie in three more words: Werewolves are awesome.
Jacob Stryker (Auggi Alvarez) is a man who has had his genes spliced with those of a wolf and is therefore one of those awesome werewolves. He’s lost his son Caleb after he escaped the government ghouls who operated on him. And oh yeah, he has a bomb ready to blow his guts up in 72 hours, which is taking Snake Plissken cosplay taken as far as you can take it.
He’s being tracked by cannibals, bounty hunters, a ninja, a cyborg grandmother and an entire army with only a small group of rebels like Talon and Athena helping him. But you know, Stryker doesn’t need anybody. He’s a werewolf in the time after the fall of man.
This movie doesn’t have any budget, but there are still car chases and people throwing themselves out of moving vehicles which is at once awesome and wreckless and you know, I’ll go with awesome. More people should be willing to face death for the joy of post-apocalyptic cinema.
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.
You can also buy the blu ray from Diabolik DVD and follow Visual Vengeance on social media on Instagram and Twitter.
A notorious underground classic for the last 25 years, this so-called American Video Nasty is finally available to a mass audience. And thanks to Visual Vengeance — due diligence, I’ve recorded several commentary tracks and written liner notes for some upcoming films — this is available for the first time ever on blu ray. If you haven’t seen one of their releases yet, it’s like the Criterion Collection grew a sack and stopped releasing movies that eight snooty people care about and started releasing movies that eight maniacs care about with all the love and care that pure cinema deserves, if pure cinema is a movie with a flying zombie baby.
Directed by Matt Jaissle from a script by Todd Tjersland and Sammy Shapiro, things get started when police detectives Martin Manners (Steve Sheppard) and Orville Sloane (Gary Browning) arrive too late to save Manners’ sister from being the next target of hockey-masked rapist serial killer Logan (Isaac Cooper), a killer who has aready claimed two hundred victims. Manners snaps when he gets to the scene and becomes judge, jury and executioner as he blows Logan away.
Some time later, a Luciferian gang marches through the cemetery where Logan has been buried. They kill his infant child — living up to the promise of the Satanic Panic — and throw it into Logan’s grave before taking turns urinating on its dead corpse, all the while chanting rituals and making you consider whether you’re ready for what this movie has to deliver. This ceremony brings Logan back, except now he has a yard-long appendage and he’s ready to use it on any girl unlucky enough to get in his way, including German porn star Dru Berrymore and a girl who is assaulting the tradesman’s entrance of a blow-up doll that Logan falls in love with.
Keep in mind — this baby is totally a toy and that fact is never disguised, pushing this movie from simply strange into sheer madness, the kind that I hunt down and treasure.
Two of the cult members, Barney (Jason McGee) and Jack (Christian Curmudgeon) are trying to escape the carnage they created, as the baby comes back as a flying zombie with a cartoon voice and Manners continues to go down a dark path filled with violence and drug use.
How could this movie be made any better? Well, it’s dedicated to Joe D’Amato and trust me, I think the man of many names would approve of the sheer lunacy and exploitation madness that this movie contains.
Just a warning: nearly every scene in this movie is filled with sex, violence or sex being interrupted with violence. It’s a vile, disgusting movie with a helium-voiced flying demon baby, and you’re not going to find anything else like it anywhere.
Directed by Victoria Duley and written by Adam Meyer, this Tubi Original tells the story of Freddie Prinze. If you were alive in the 1970s, you saw his rise and fall. Today, he may only be known for being the father of Freddie Prinze Jr. This doc gives you the chance to learn just what he meant to the Latin community and how he made such a major career in such a short time.
As someone who deals with anxiety and puts everything into his work, I was really touched by the fact that Freddie did the same and didn’t have the tools or the help to fix his issues. I wish that more people remembered him and what his career meant. Hopefully, you’ll watch this documentary and learn more about him and take the time to watch some of his comedy routines and maybe an episode of Chico and the Man.
I really enjoyed seeing the pop culture of the 70s in this as well as the meaning of getting to do stand up on Carson. It’s another cultural moment that is lost and I worry will be forgotten. Also: If you feel the same kinds of pressure that Freddie did or any mental issues, get help. You’re worth it.
This Tubi true crime documentary is about a murder in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when Zachariah Anderson killed the current boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend, Rosalio Gutierrez Jr. She had reported to the police that she had not seen him in several days and when she went to his apartment, she could see blood and signs of a fight. Blood samples were taken by the cops and they determined that Rosalio was dead.
He had not been seen for some time and had not seen his two children, who visited every weekend. Anderson was found to have a burn pit that had remnants of clothing that matched the victim. He also showed up on video shopping at Walmart and buying garbage bags, gloves and Clorox wipes.
From the start of the crime — and the stalking — all the way through the court case, this Tubi documentary has you covered. The body has never been found but this story will tell you what happened next.
A Cleveland woman named Uloma Curry-Walker may have hired people to kill her firefighter husband William just to get the insurance money. She was in debt when she asked her teenage daughter and the girl’s boyfriend to find someone to kill the heroic man.
She then gave the boyfriend, Chad Padgett a $1,000 down payment and he hired Chris Hein, who didn’t get the job done, and then a man named Ryan Dorty to kill William.
The problem? Walker’s ex-wife was still the person who got the insurance, not his new wife.
Director Victoria Duley and writer Ben Greguoli have put together a Tubi documentary that will tell you the story including video and reenactment to make it feel like you get it all. You may have seen this on other true crime shows — I’ve lost track of murders now — but it’s still pretty well done.
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