The Amazing Two-Headed Transplant came out in 1971 and The Thing With Two Heads more famously was playing theaters in 1972, but as strange as it is seeing Rosey Grier and Ray Milland share the same body, Andy Milligan can somehow outdo any movie, one or tw0-headed, just by making his normal — well, not really normal — movie.

Don’t be put off by the idea that this is based on a classic book like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mri Hyde. It’s still certifiable.

Dr. Jekyll (Dennis DeMarne) has perfected a surgery — well, as much as cracking open a skull and poking a brain can be an operation — that allows him to isolate the evil in the brain. Everyone thinks that this is a ludicrous idea, so he invents a formula that allows someone to become the dark side of their mind. Why would anyone want this? Science is like that. Now, the good doctor becomes Danny Blood, who is everything twisted inside his once medically inclined brain.

Instead of just being with his wife — who definitely wants him — Mary Anne Marsden (Gay Field), Jekyll would rather experiment in the laboratory. His assistant, Jack Smithers (Berwick Kaler), would rather be getting with Jekyll’s sister Carla (Jaqueline Lawrence), so in the middle of their tryst, he gets all the formula’s notes soaked. That means there’s no changing back now.

But does the doctor even want to? I mean, Danny Blood does stuff like force barmaid April Conners (Julia Stratton) to bark like a dog and rides her around quite literally while absolutely shrieking, “You shouldn’t be allowed on the face of this earth! You’re scum! You’re the defecation of the slums of London!”

I mean, if that’s consensual, good for you, Danny Blood. But then he decides that topping ladies isn’t enough. He needs to kill some to get off.

Who loved the fog machine more? Andy Milligan or Lucio Fulci? I mean, my nose is burning just from watching this and it was made fifty years ago. But whatever. Smoke up all the fog, Andy, and let your characters shout at the heavens.

But no, no one in this movie has two heads.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Vapors was Andy Milligan’s first official film. It was first released as an underground gay film in selected art houses in 1965 and to the general public in 1967. Today, it could really play anywhere, not in adults only theaters.

Directed by Milligan and written by Hope Stansbury, all of the interior shots were filmed in a vacant apartment floor on 199 Prince Street in Manhattan, the same apartment building where Milligan lived. The clerk scene was shot in a candy store and the opening exterior shot of the bathhouse was filmed outside the actual St. Marks Bathhouse on 6 St. Marks Place in the East Village, a location famous at the time for hookups when gay sex was illegal in New York City. Keep in mind this was just over fifty years ago.

The entire movie takes place inside the St. Marks Baths, as a young man named Thomas sits on a bed and observes the other men and their personalities. He’s joined by an older man named Mr. Jaffe  They get pasty their opening lies — Thomas is not a frequent visitor, Jaffe is not a first-timer — and begin to discuss their lives. Jaffe has been married for 19 years and wants nothing to do with his wife any longer. Sixteen years ago, their son drowned and life has never been the same. He sees something of his son in Thomas and has to leave, but promises to send him a gift. The loudness of the baths continues as a paper sunflower arrives for Thomas, who cries upon Mr. Thomas leaving, but is soon greeted by another man who disrobes for anonymous sex with the young man.

This movie feels like a place that I am invading and not just because I am a heterosexual. It’s because Milligan has so completely created a privacy between these two men that only they should share and we’re just as bad as that peeping tom looking through a hole in the wall. It’s fascinating to see this movie, one free from murder and the supernatural, and see where Milligan’s movies went after this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

With the help of experts, advocates and marine biologists, as well as survivors of near-death encounters, this documentary seeks to look into the pop culture myths about sharks and show just how true they are.

Directed by Victoria Duley (Queen of Cocaine, Sins of the Father: The Green River Killer) and written by Savannah Lucas (Scariest Places In America, Love You to Death: The Jodi Arias Story), this explores real-life shark attacks, why they happened and why they are so different from what we’ve seen in movies.

This gets into the size and speed of actual sharks, as well as how they behave when not around humans. But the real meat — man, what a bad pun, right? — is hearing from actual survivors of shark attacks. There’s a mix of some pretty bloody recreations and even gorier photos of the actual damage these sharks unleashed on people.  It’s so incredible that so many of these people survived.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he is a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His upcoming essay “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover,” detailing bizarre and hilarious stories about midnight movies, grindhouses, and exploitation films, will appear in the next issue of Drive-In Asylum.

In the past few decades, the Korean film industry has taken off. Director Park Chan-wook has an enviable filmography with Oldboy, Decision to Leave and Stoker. And Bong Joon-ho, Korea’s best director, helmed The Host, Okja and Snowpiercer before Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. As well as Parasite’s also winning Best International Feature Film, Bong collected Oscars for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Korean films stand tall in world cinema. But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, there was a Korean monster movie that tried to copy the success of King Kong and Godzilla. Thought lost for decades, Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967) escaped from the Korean Film Archive. It played the 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal ahead of its first DVD release anywhere. Read further—if you dare—to learn more about a film that will never be confused with any of the great masterpieces of Korean cinema.

Space Monster Wangmagwi, filmed in glorious black-and-white, opens with a shot of a star field in outer space—or more correctly, what looks to be lights shining through pinholes punched in black construction paper to simulate stars. A paper mache spaceship powered by the flame of a matchstick appears, and we meet some aliens from planet Gamma, wearing the ugliest spacesuits you’ve ever seen. The aliens are headed to conquer earth. Their plan, which will turn out to be poorly planned, involves dropping Wangmagwi, a five-foot-something monster, on earth, where, as the Gammarians have calculated, he will grow 100 times his normal size and conquer the planet while under their remote control.

Wangmagwi, literally meaning “devil king” in Korean, lands on earth and does grow to enormous size. I suppose he’s some sort of reptile man, but it’s hard to tell because the monster suit is the worst I’ve ever seen: It looks like paper mache randomly thrown on some Korean guy wearing bedroom slippers with glued-on claws. This formidable space monster starts knocking over miniature buildings, which, while not as nice as the stuff Toho was doing at the time, doesn’t look too bad. But the film’s foley effects are horrendous. Collapsing buildings sound like pots falling out of a kitchen cabinet. 

We next meet someone who should be our hero—but isn’t—a pilot called away from his bride-to-be on the eve of their wedding to fight the monster. He ultimately figures very little in the plot, a bizarre screenwriting choice. 

But the most off-putting and bewildering aspect of the film is its attempts at humor. At one point, when we see the multitude of extras trying to escape the space monster, folks are literally running in circles. This is bluntly intercut (the editing of this film looks like it was done in the dark with children’s plastic scissors) with scenes of two friends who have an idiotic bet about who will be more frightened by the monster, a woman giving birth, and a guy looking for a newspaper so that he can find a quiet corner amidst the chaos to evacuate his bowels. I shit you not. (The punchline is that after he finds a newspaper and takes his dump, the escaping throng pushes him down onto his own excrement. Charming.) 

Our ostensible hero, a small boy, winds up in Wangmagwi’s ear canal. The kid then cuts Wangmagwi’s eardrums while yelling things like “I made you deaf, bastard” and urinates inside the monster’s skull. (I couldn’t make this up if I tried.) Seeing these hijinks left me slack-jawed and appalled. And I thought the scene in that other 1967 Korean monster film, Yongary, Monster from Deep, where the monster was sprayed with itching powder and rolls around in his death throes in a riverbed before bleeding from his anus and dying was the worst thing I’d ever seen in a kaiju eiga. I just don’t get the Koreans’ humor or their fixation on bodily fluids.

Meanwhile, with all this destruction happening, the air force is scrambling its jets, but they don’t attack Wangmagwi. The high command doesn’t want to endanger the populace (more like that would involve special effects that the filmmakers didn’t have the money for or skill to pull off). Anyway, before the fleet of stock-footage jets has to appear in the same shot as the monster, the alien commander intones “it looks like our shrewd plan has failed” (Shrewd plan? These aliens are friggin’ morons.), and he gives the order to have the monster self-destruct, which it does. Happy ending.

I was emotionally scarred by Space Monster Wangmagwi, but I’m glad I saw it… as a form of masochism, I guess. (I’m terrified that I’ll start hallucinating scenes from it the next time I drink too much absinthe.) It’s that rare thing: a perfect object. Perfectly bonkers. Check it out—if you dare—on Tubi.

From the very beginning of this movie, you know that you are in the world of Alvaro Passeri and it is a very strange place.

The camera pans down a long hallway inside a hospital and there we see labs, operating rooms and storage rooms, all rendering in extreme detail but also looking like paintings. In one room, however, there are creatures still alive inside restraints, dead things inside jars and a man named Michael Corday operating on a human head.

One would wonder why the film suddenly cuts to Gayle Mainwaring and her photo studio, but this is, again, not our world. And one not like any other movie. There’s a model named Lucy shows up and gets raped and killed in a scene that shocked me. No one knows what to do before Corday takes charge and shows everyone how to get rid of the evidence. He takes her body and removes her green eye in a surgery scene much like the opening of the film.

But then this goes from a mad scientist movie to a giallo, as everyone at the party gets murdered. Except no giallo would have the budget to be in the Arctic and the pyramids, as this movie takes us, but it’s through the low res CGI that Passeri is the master of. There’s also an incredible dive into molten steel.

Now, you may ask, why do a cave explorer, a construction worker, a foundry foreman, a mountaineer, a famous fashion photographer, an archaeologist and the world’s best eye surgeon all get together and randomly assault and murder young women?

This movie has BS science the likes of which Argento and Cozzi could never dream of, visuals that no one has ever seen before and absolute disregard for making a film that in any way fits into any definition of normal. You can’t look away from a single second of it but sometimes you have to, because this is the kind of film that overwhelms you with how dense it is.

The only bad thing about it is that its the fifth of Passeri’s films and the last he made. By reading his website, it seems like he’s concentrating on making automatons. If he ever wants to make another movie, I’m willing to kickstart as much cash as he needs.

You can also go back and watch the other movies that he worked on. He did scenic sculpture for Tentacles, Caligula, The Shark Hunter, Starcrash (that makes sense), Inferno, The Last Shark, Alien 2: On Earth, Piranha II, Hercules (again, makes sense) and 2019: After the Fall of New York. He also did effects for Warriors of the Year 2072, Atlantis Interceptors, Light Blast, The Wild Beasts, Sinbad, The Barbarians, Aenigma and Dolls.

I have so many questions about this movie. Someday, I hope to have answers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Roulette One is a flying luxury casino filled with millionaires and a casino manager who plans on robbing them thanks to his computer programmed to cheat. But then the plane flies through a cloud and everyone on board starts to either become a monster or become eaten by those monsters.

If anyone else made this movie, I’d be calling out how much of it rips off The Thing, Alien and maybe even The Langoliers. Instead, it’s an Alvaro Passeri movie and I’m celebrating it.

Soon, the crew of Carol (Sinne Mutsaers), Janet (Basia Wajs), Don (Eric Bassanesi) and Pat (Giulia Bernardini) are dealing with alien monsters that explode out of people and I’m loving every moment on this CGI-generated plane. And by CGI, I mean everything looks unreal beyond belief. And then Janet has an alien literally crawl between her legs and impregnate her.

I’ve never even considered a movie made with Amiga-level computer animation that has mini-golf on a luxury jet and chess that people bet on. Everything looks soft and brightly colored, like candy that I can’t wait to let my eyes devour. There are also so many lens flares.

Why do they have a flamethrower on this plane? Actually, of all the questions I have, that’s the simplest one. The big one is who are these movies for outside of Passeri? Every one of his films is so idiosyncratic and outright strange and not in the way that says, “Look how wacky I am!” They are absolutely earned strangeness, pure joy captured and ready to reach those ready for it.

Also: Every review that I read where people talk about how bad this movie is or how horrible the effects are, I don’t get mad. I feel bad for these people. I am saddened for them and their lack of imagination and aesthetics.

I also totally appreciate that of all the things that Passeri has ripped off for this movie, the ending of Nightmare City is one of them.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I used to worry that I would run out of berserk Italian movies, especially when the 1990s give way to the 2000s but that shows what I know, because The Mummy Theme Park is one of the most baffling, weird, wonderful and just plain strange movies that I’ve seen.

Alvaro Passeri has only directed five movies*, including Plankton, Flight to Hell, The Golden Grain and Psychovision. His animation skills — he worked on Cinema Paradiso, The Shark Hunter, The Wild Beasts, Atlantis Interceptors and more — really come in handy here because this is a movie that sees its low budget and says, “We can do more.”

An earthquake reveals the underground City of the Dead in Egypt and Sheik El Sahid get the somewhat bright and probably more deranged idea to take all of the mummies and fit them with animatronics and turn them into a Jurassic Park in the sands. He wants it to be a big deal, so he calls over photographer Daniel Flynn (Adam O’Neil) and his co-worker Julie (Holly Laningham) to take photos of the place, which as far as I can tell is one room with mirrors and miniatures and all manner of in-camera and in-post special effects working as hard as they can and then some to make this movie look bigger than it is while also looking cheap while also appearing to be one of the most charming movies I’ve ever seen. It’s neon, it’s glitter, it’s robot mummies, it’s insane.

And yet, this isn’t a movie made goofy on purpose. It’s deliriously sure of itself and yet unaware of what it is at the same time and that’s the combination that I love more than any other when it comes to weird movies.

Can the flash of a camera bring mummies back to life? Are women’s breasts the only thing that can stop them? Will heads get torn off? Will someone puke up everything inside them? Can a chase scene go on forever? Will there be long scenes of fashion that pad the running time? Will there be a model train that goes through a sphinx? Is there also an evil sorceress? Will the sheik’s harem fight against one another and will one of them also be a hologram? Will there be a souvenir shop that has pharaoh heads that spit out beer?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

I mean, this is the kind of movie where a dude gets his head sliced in half and the results look like those cutaway pages in encyclopedias we all used to obsess over. And for that reason and so many others, this is perfect. Man, I’m still processing this movie. I keep reading reviews laughing about how cheap this movie looks and we should be so lucky to have this in our lives.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Under that name, that is. There’s also the rumor that he’s Massimiliano Cerchi, the name under which he’s directed seventeen movies including The Penthouse that came out this year. Unless there are two directors and special effects guys who have the same name and I’ve been surprised before and if you do the math, Cerchi was making those movies when he was eight. IMDB used to have them as the same person and now they’re separated, so perhaps…who can say!?!

Let me just let Alvaro Passeri tell you what this movie is about.

“It’s Christmas Eve and the snow is falling gently all around a log cabin. This is the home of Mary. who lives here with her family. She has a serious case of flu and is lying in bed with a very high temperature. Gathered around her is Kevin her young brother. her mother Nancy and her grandfather. Kevin opens the Christmas gifts and finds a book called The Golden Grain He starts to read it. Out in distant space, the Little People’s Castle is threatened by the Black Fortress. ruled by Makeb. The king of the castle calls the Queen of Hope for help. Her name is Jade and when she reaches the Fortress she gets drawn into a dangerous computer game with Makeb. She is attacked on all sides by huge balls of fire. slashing swords. laser rags and a terrible monster. Back at Mary’s house. Jethro, a nasty neighbor, is trying to take the place of Nancy’s husband who is missing, presumed dead. When the game comes to an end Makeb plays the Joker and a flood sweeps Jade away. At the same time Mary’s heart stops beating! Then Jade reappears again alive and well. The death ray hits Makeb. whose mask falls off to reveal the face of Jethro. Jade triumphantly reaches the Castle of the Little People and is presented with a grain of corn as her reward. which begins to glow in the palm of her hand. She throws it and it lands by Mary’s cabin. Suddenly cured. she leaps out of bed. ripping off the scarf around her head, to reveal the face of Jade! At that moment the door opens and Mary’s father comes in. having escaped from a mine he had been trapped in for weeks. At midnight the family gathers around the fire. happy and united once again. It’s going to be a happy Christmas.”

This is literally the description of the movie and it gives most of the film away.

Let me tell you something.

You could be told word for word everything that happens in this movie and in no way will you be ready for it.

This is The NeverEnding Story that I had hoped that movie would be when I saw the trailer as a kid. Alvaro Passeri is the closest director that I’ve ever seen to Luigi Cozzi at his wildest. This is also very The Princess Bride if that movie also had a Satanic figure whose face looks like he came directly out of Ron Ormond’s The Burning Hell.

The first of Passeri’s films I saw was The Mummy Theme Park and this delivers the same delirious world of gigantic factories filled with tiny rooms of drones, all creating death machines, all preparing to fire mind cannons at the Queen of Hope. Yet these are all human beings inside those cubicles from Hell, all moving and living and breathing.

There are puppet people, there’s an entire bar filled with skeletons — and the dog hero also bites one of the leg bones and runs with it — and so much charm. This is a movie that I have run through my head again and again, way more often than movies with budgets thirty times more.

A video game puppet stop motion Christmas movie with an alternate reality inside a book that brings you back to a potential snowbound tragedy. All of Passeri’s movies have a sense of childlike wonder, but they often have eyeballs getting torn out and bodies being destroyed. This one is kid-friendly, even if it might be the oddest movie your children ever see.

You can watch this on YouTube.