This film was made due to director Silvio Amadio (Il Sorriso Della Iena, Amuck!) and his interest in the occult. He had learned of it through his friendship with Demofilo Fidani, the director of four different Sartana ripoffs (One Damned Day at Dawn… Django Meets Sartana!, Passa Sartana… è l’ombra della tua morte, Four Came to Kill Sartana and Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End) and the giallo A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services.

By the 1980s, Amadio was more known for his work with esoterism, which is a combination of pagan philosophies, the Kabbalah and Christian philosophy. According to Roberto Curty in Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989, the director worked with a group known as Circolo di spiritualisti (Circle of Spiritualists) and became a well-respected occult writer and a devotee of conjuring the dead to visit him.

An American composer Paul Robbins (Guido Mannari, Caligula) who uses the dodecaphone twelve-note technique has come to Rome with his ten-year-old son Alan (Stefano Mastrogirolamo) to work on a new opera. He hires Laura (Sherry Buchanan, Eyes Behind the Stars) to look after the boy who has an imaginary friend — a raven-tressed woman dressed in white — whose voice starts showing up on tapes, just as his father is attacked by a dog. The woman eventually possesses Alan as part of a revenge plot; Daniela (Martine Brochard, Eyeball) believes that her sister Eleonora’s death — Paul’s wife and Alan’s mother — was brought about by the composer. Now, he must rely on Professor Power (Philippe Leroy, The Laughing Woman) to save his son through a psychic duel fought — as Chris Claremont would write — not in the physical realm, but the astral plane, no quarter asked, none given.

It’s the first movie written by Claudio Fragasso, who told Fangoria, “Silvio Amadio came to me with an actual medium and told me that the dead had told them I should write the script.”

The first twenty minutes of this movie explain how Peo (Piero Vida) became Father Renigio after his younger years of vice. As a criminal who goes by Carlo hides in his church, Peo goes to speak to the man’s exotic dancer girlfriend Alma Del Rio and tell her how he once hid in a castle and met Satan.

An old man (Christopher Lee) had opened his castle for him and several of his friends, asking them to help find the dead body of his wife, but they were so high that they decided to have a bongo dance line instead.

Shot under the name Faust ’63 and originally called Katarsis, this feels like if Jerry Warren and Jess Franco made an Italian Gothic movie together and made a goofy-eyed spider as one of the monsters. Its production company, I Films della Mangusta, went bankrupt shortly after filming. The movie was bought by Eco Film, who added the new footage. Director Giuseppe Vegezzi dropped out of directing movies after this experience and even attempted suicide, which is why the first twenty minutes feel like a totally different movie, as they were added to pad the time.

Somehow, the music from this movie by Berto Pisano made its way into Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror.

At one point, this was a lost movie. Now, you can watch it on streaming whenever you want.

You can get this from Severin as part of The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection or watch it on Tubi.

Based on Un’anima persa by Giovanni Arpino, The Forbidden Room has Tino (Danilo Mattei) come to Venice to study painting and stay with his Uncle Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and Aunt Elisa Stolz (Catherine Deneuve). Yet the house just seems off; Fabio is abusive to Elisa. She just takes it.

He also starts to hear sounds from the attic in the section of the house he is never allowed to explore. It’s gigantic yet has fallen into ruin, cobwebs and cracks all over, even as it contains a full theater where Elisa once performed. The sounds come from a door behind the stage and soon, Tino learns that they belong to another uncle. Annetta (Ester Carloni), the housekeeper, allows him to enter that door and he learns that it is where Fabio’s brother (also Gassman) lives. He has gone mad after the death of Elisa’s ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage and screams, eats like a child and destroys baby dolls. But is the girl dead? And how did she die? The truth will ruin Tino, sending him away from painting and Venice, which always seems to attract the most gloomy of movies.

Director Dino Risi also made the original The Scent of a Woman. He wrote the script with Bernardino Zapponi, who wrote Deep Red. This has fantastic elements that show up before it’s over but is more drama than horror. However, it’s so well made that it will keep your interest for the whole film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Kiss or The Kiss of Death was directed by Mario Lanfranchi (Death Sentence), who also wrote the script with Pupi Avati. It’s based on Il bacio di una morta by Carolina Invernizio, which was already adapted by Guido Brignone in 1949 and Carlo Infascelli just a year earlier in 1973.

Countess Elena Rambaldi (Eleonora Giorgi) has a half-brother named Alfonso (Brian Deacon) who has been exiled by their father, Count Rambaldi. When Alfonso comes home and embraces his sister, it upsets the elder Rambaldi so much that he dies from a heart attack. Elena inherits his fortune and soon falls in love with Guido (Maurizio Bonuglia) and goes to Venice for their honeymoon, which does not last long as he’s soon enraptured by a dancer named Nara (Martine Beswick). She convinces him that his wife and her brother are lovers. He responds by allowing his new lover to poison Elena, who is brought back to life by a kiss from her brother while lying in her coffin. Guido sees that he was wrong and leaves Nara, who accuses him of killing his wife. 

In Robert Curti’s book Italian Gothic Horror Movies 1970-79, he states that this movie was based on an Italian feuilleton or serial novel, which was the literary ancestor of the Italian Gothic, creating a mixture of melodrama, horror and romance.

Avati added occult elements to the story, like the sapphic witch Madame Lixen (Valentina Cortese) who conducts Satanic masses and has a volcanic scene with Beswick. There are also horror elements here, like when Guido searches for his wife’s ghost throughout the streets of Venice and Nara dances for him with a bra that has demonic hands cupping his breasts.

It’s not really horror, not really romance, but actually pretty good.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed and written by Jean-Marc Minéo, a former six-time kung fu champion of France, Europe and finally the world champion, Last Resort reminds me of the films released by Cannon-like labels after it went out of business, 1990s direct to video efforts that were all about action, that got the story out of the way as soon as possible. This is not a bad thing.

Michael Reed (Jon Foo) nearly died in Syria and ever since can’t get himself off the couch. This former soldier has pushed his wife Kim (Julaluck Ismalone) away and she’s taken their daughter Anna (Angelina Ismalone) to the bank and then out of his life. They’re taken hostage by Islamic terrorists led by an American named Cooper (Clayton Norcross) who are really after a bioterror weapon in one of the safety deposit boxes. He didn’t count on Michael — who he knows, it turns out that Michael wasn’t an ordinary soldier — who starts killing his men one-by-one, as this movie echoes so much of Die Hard but yet, doesn’t every action movie made after it do the same? For example, there’s one cop who looks out for our hero when no one else believes in him.

There’s enough fighting and guns in this — including a sniper ending that I wish I’d seen in a crowded theater — to satisfy most action fans. Sure, it’s a by the numbers shoot ’em up run and gun film, but we don’t get that many of those any more. I can look past the awkward line readings if I’m going to get stuff that moves this fast and looks this good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

How did the Star Wars Holiday Special ever happen?

George Lucas was trying to keep Star Wars on peoples’ minds by producing a holiday variety TV special. As the filmmakers ask, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

Directors Jeremy Koon (Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made) and Steve Kozak have assembled the people who were there when it was made, the folks who watched it when it was first on TV and those who have been influenced by it. You’ll hear from writer Bruce Villanch, director Steve Binder, superfans like Paul Scheer and Taran Killam, and those who have been close to the Forece like Seth Green and Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond? Yes.

I watched the special live when it aired — the only time it ever played — on November 17, 1978. Even at six years of age, I wondered why Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, Diahann Carroll, Starship and Art Carney were in a special that should have been about the Rebellion fighting the Empire.

What cultural force can unite Bob Mackie — who designed the dresses — and Weird Al, Kevin Smith, Mick Garris and the Wookies?

Only the Star Wars Holiday Special. 

This film does a great job of explaining why this happened without just making fun of it. It would have been so easy to just laugh at it, but I love that this takes a balanced — yet still fun — look at something many have heard of and few have seen.

You can watch this movie on demand, on blu ray and DVD and in select theaters. For more information, visit the official site.

Directed and written by Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez, this is the story of Diego (Alberto Ammann) and Elena (Bruna Cusí) as they attempt to enter the United States. Their trip stops in New York City, where they had hoped to see Diego’s brother before moving to Miami. But as they are lost inside customs, they may never go anywhere.

The frightening thing about Upon Entry is how realistic it is while how much it also feels like something out of Kafka. They get no answers, no food, no water and instead question after question about everything in their lives, which slowly become more intrusive and therefore painful to attempt to answer.

We learn nothing of the situation and these characters other than from the answers that Diego and Elena give to the man and woman (Ben Temple and Laura Gómez) interrogating them. As we wish to learn who they are and why they are being kept, we become complicit in the way they are mistreated.

There are moments throughout this film that disarmed me and then would worry me, as I was caught up in the same questioning techniques, feeling trapped in the same small room as this film’s heroes. Is this what it’s like to come to the land of opportunity? And yet some will see them and their foreign origins as reasons to see them as less than human beings. This movie frightens me the more I consider it.

What an incredible work. This needs to be seen.

You can watch this on Tubi.

David Slade, director of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night, stepped into the chair to direct the third Twilight movie, which was going to be a blockbuster just by the force of its fans. One major change would be that the film’s main enemy vampire Victoria would be played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Victoria starts the movie by attacking a young man named Riley Biers (Xavier Samuel) as part of her goal of making an army of newborn vampires to get her revenge on Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) for killing her true love. sa for Edward and Bella (Kristen Stewart), they’re still going back and forth over turning her and getting married. As for her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), he forcibly kisses Bella as he’s in love with her.

Anyways…

Alice (Ashley Greene) has a psychic flashforward of the newborn army attacking the Cullens, which calls for a truce between the vampires and Lycans. Bella also learns that mated vampire pairs experience stronger love than normal humans — again, if you think this entire story doesn’t have major BDSM themes, I’ll let you whip me — so she agrees to marry Edward. She’s also fallen in love with Jacob but it’s not a love as strong as the one she has with Edward.

In the battle with the vicious baby — well, newborn — vampires, Victoria is finally killed by Edward and Riley is killed by Seth. Then, the Volturi arrive and find the Cullens guarding a newborn vampire by the name of Bree Tanner (Jodelle Ferland). Despite the fact that she surrendered, Jane (Dakota Fanning) tells Felix (Daniel Cudmore) to kill her. She also remarks that Bella is still human, but Bella informs her that she plans to get married, have sex and then become a vampire.

Her dad is really going to be the last to know.

This installment of Twilight only serves to set us up for the wild lunacy of the final two movies. Get ready.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: Eclipse has extras, like two commentary tracks (Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart on one, Stephenie Meyer and Wyck Godfrey the alternate), a part of the six-part making-of doc, extended scenes, cast interviews, music videos for Muse’s “Neutron Star Collision” and Metric’s “Eclipse (All Yours)” and so much more. Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.

Thomas the Possessed (or Thomas and the Bewitched, I have seen both translations) is from director Pupi Averti, who wrote it with his brother Antonio and Giorgio Celli. It was his second film, one he said that was cursed by family issues and money issues.

A new theater company — Edmund Purdom is one of the actors — is about to put on its first performance, the story of a child named Thomas who a woman believes that she has given birth to but who does not exist. They’re met by a man who offers to read the fortune of the play. At that seance, they are introduced to Thomas, who has become a real person.

On the way to the town where they will perform, they meet an actor hanging from a tree who claims to be the only survivor of a performance gone wrong, one that ended with the audience murdering all of the actors except for him. This must have happened, as the audience is already attacking the stage before the first scene. This is after they rode a ghost train to the town, so at this point, anything could happen.

From a cemetery with bottles instead of graves, the sexual revolution and a hospice home where the elderly die rapidly, Thomas the Possessed is one strange movie, yet we should accept no less from its director. If it all ends where it begins, we must accept this.

After this failed to find an audience, it would take Averti five years to make his next film, La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone. A year later, he would make Bordella and the movie he may be best known for, The House With the Laughing Windows. He’s still directing movies today.

For some time, the only way to see this was to rent the copy in the Bologna library, which Averti himself donated. Its production company went out of business and the movie had only played the 1970 film festival in Locarno.

You can watch this film on YouTube.

Shot in the same time period as Le amanti del mostro — which is also directed by Sergio Garrone —  The Hand That Feeds the Dead combines the ideas of Frankenstein with one of my favorite plots, the intelligent doctor driven to mad things because of love. Also see: Eyes Without a Face, Faceless, Corruption, Mansion of the Doomed and Atom Age Vampire.

Professor Nijinski (Klaus Kinski) was working on skin grafts when a fire in his lab burned the face of his wife Tania (Katia Christine). This inferno also claims the life of the professor’s mentor — and Tania’s father — Doctor Baron Ivan Rassimov and that name has to be a joke, right?

While the mad scientist is using his hunchback assistant Vanya (Erol Taş) to kill women in the village and then use their skin in super gory — thanks Carlo Rambaldi! — surgical scenes that blew my mind. I mean, there are tubes everywhere, small balls filled with blood and machinery that is needlessly — and therefore, totally awesome — complicated.

Also staying in the decaying mansion is Sonia (Stella Calderoni), newlyweds Masha and Alex (Katia Christine and Ayhan Isik) and Katja (Marzia Damon), who is looking for her missing sister. Somehow, in the midst of this surgical gore freakout, there’s also an extended lesbian makeout, which may not make sense until you realize that Garrone also made SS Experiment Camp and the most horror-filled Italian Western there has ever been, Django the Bastard.

This was produced by Turkish Şakir V. Sözen, who cast Ayhan Işık and provided the villa in Istanbul where it was filmed. It was not released in Turkey until 1986 after actor and producer Yilmaz Duru bought it from Sözen and released it as Ölümün Nefesi (Bread of Death).

I absolutely went wild for this movie. Yes, it’s not the greatest Italian horror movie ever, but man, those surgical scenes look great even today when it comes to practical special effects. As always, I also love seeing Kinski and waiting for him to get worked up.