Directed by Kwak Jeong-deok, Night of the Assassin is the story of a killing machine named Lee Nan (Shin Hyeon-jun), who discovers that he has a deadly, long-dormant health condition. As he goes into hiding to seek the magical herb that can heal him — mahwangcho — he learns that he can’t stay hidden for long, as the restaurant owner Seon-hong and her son Chil-bok who took him in are under threat.

Now that Lee Nan is sick, it’s easy for the women and her son to only see him as a beggar. But to the other killers, he’s now a target, as they may finally have an advantage against him. Well, his doctor said he can never fight again. Or be with a woman. He better find that healing herb soon, right?

Just a simple waiter at Seon-hong’s cafe, Lee Nan must eventually battle gang boss Ibang (Lee Moon-sik), who has the locals all hooked on opium and whose bandits are keeping him from seeking his cure. All the while, Lee Nan is going through a crisis of the soul, wondering if this is his punishment for a life spent killing others.

I really enjoy this movie. It feels kind of like a fairy tale and does a great job of presenting the emotional toll that being a bad ass action hero must put on your soul.

Night of the Assassin is available on DVD and blu-ray from Well Go USA. It’s also streaming on Hi-YAH!

It took more than thirty years, but Coffin Joe was finally able to complete his story that began in At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. Creator and star José Mojica Marins felt that since he compromised on the sending of the second film, he was cursed. Now, he could finally tell the story.

After being released from a mental ward, Coffin Joe is taken care of by his most loyal servant Bruno (Rui Rezende), who along with four fanatics has been waiting for the return of the master. Of course, his order is simple: bring the perfect woman and continue the blood.

There are so many women and so little time. Like eugenist Dr. Hilda (Cléo De Páris), who is drugged and hallucinates that Coffin Joe is feeding her one of her ass cheeks. Or a young gypsy woman named Elena (Nara Sakarê) who willingly gives herself to him.

But all is not snakes and spiders in Brazil. Coronel Claudiomiro Pontes (Jece Valadão), a police captain blinded by Coffin Joe when he escaped his fate at the end of This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse — young Joe is played by superfan Raymond Castile — and Father Eugênio (Milhem Cortaz), a priest who is the son of Dr. Rudolfo from At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, have joined forced to destroy the undertaker forever.

Coffin Joe is also dealing with the ghosts of his many victims, including Terezinha and Lenita from At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and Laura from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. He’s also been cursed by Elena’s witch aunts, which turns the opportunity to make love to Elena into a trip through a gigantic intestine into a meeting with the Mystifier (José Celso Martinez Corrêa), who shows Coffin Joe purgatory and Hell, as well as a vision of his death.

As the police close in, Joe escapes through the woods and into an amusement park where he kills the cop but is impaled through the heart by the priest. He’s convinced that he’s killed Coffin Joe, but you can’t kill an idea. His shadow comes loose from his body to chase the priest while Elena mounts the dying body of our, well, hero and his hands, trembling in the throes of death, hold her breasts.

Coffin Joe’s funeral should be sad, but as we see the women throw roses at his grave, so many of them have continued the blood and are filled with his heirs. The gravestone is shattered by lightning and multiple faces of Coffin Joe appear within it.

For being seventy years old. José Mojica Marins in no way took it easy in this. It’s the bloodiest of all the films and the most complete. Not the best — I really think This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is incredible — but I had a total blast watching it. It’s a return that is in no way unwelcome or one that feels like it doesn’t belong.

Wikipedia refers to this movie as an “American psychological thriller film” while it was sold as a detective story and derided by critics as being an erotic thriller. You know what that means: it’s a giallo.

It’s also way deeper than anyone gave it credit for.

Its heroine, Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), is a full and rich character, at once introverted and attracted to danger. The New York City that she lives in is also filled with both violence and sex, even in her students. One of them, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), believes that John Wayne Gacy wasn’t guilty of his crimes because he was a victim of desire. Moments later, Frannie watches a couple engaged in oral sex in public. And on the subway, every ad seems to be a poem written directly to her.

That violence gets close, so close, to her as a severed limb is found in her garden. That’s when the men — and police — intrude on her life. Detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is so forward when he questions her that she’s excited by him. Yet as animalistic as he seems, he feels nobler than the others, like his partner Richard Rodriguez (Nick Damici) who isn’t even allowed to carry his gun after trying to kill his wife.

Frannie also notices that Malloy has a 3 of Spades tattoo, the same one she saw on the man getting pleasured in public. It’s because he’s in a secret society and can’t tell her anymore. Later that night, she’s attacked while walking home and he comes to her rescue. They have sex and when she wakes up, she realizes that some of her jewelry is missing.

But when going over the details with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Frannie starts to wonder if Malloy is the killer as well as the masked man who stalked her. Her student Cornelius is questioned — his term paper was written in his own blood — and she has to tell her ex, John (Kevin Bacon), that she thinks she’s having panic attacks. It doesn’t let up, as she soon finds the severed head of her sister.

And when Malloy has her jewelry and a key to her sister’s apartment, it all seems to come together. Or does it? Like in all giallo, can we even trust our narrator?

Jane Campion and Laurie Parker spent five years developing the film. Also, Nicole Kidman got a producer credit because she was originally cast as Frannie, but dropped out in the middle of her div force to Tom Cruise, wanting more time with her children.

I really like what Jordan Searles said about the film, as it describes why it works so well for me: “Shots depicting Frannie being watched mainly serve to highlight how women have to navigate the world under the gaze of men. Frannie is always looking over her shoulder, constantly assessing her surroundings. She knows she is being watched, yet continues to pursue pleasure on her own terms. In the end, once Frannie has faced her worst fears, In the Cut rewards that bravery.”

It’s a rare film that is able to subvert the male gaze without falling into it. It also isn’t afraid to show depictions of sex that don’t seem alien from the early 70s heyday of Italian psychosexual murder films. I always passed on this movie, a victim of how it was sold and reviewed, and now I know that I was wrong.

You can get the uncut director’s edition of In the Cut from Mill Creek Entertainment on Deep Discount.

A group of children embark on a macabre adventure into the jungle of Brazil, one filled with characters from the horror traditions of Brazil: the werewolf, a witch, a ghost, monsters and The Saci. This anthology unites four of the most important names in Brazilian horror: Rodrigo Aragao, Petter Baiestorf, Joel Caetano and Jose Mojica Marins, the eternal Coffin Joe.

In the first story, directed by the brains behind this entire movie Aragão (Dark Sea, Cemetery of Lost Souls), the corrupt mayor of a city dies on the toilet and his blood and bile go directly into the water system he refused to fix, transforming everyone who interacts with the water into zombies filled with the same filth that he was. Talk about starting things off hot, as this is filled with so many gross-out effects.

Petter Baiestorf (Zombio 2: Chimarrão Zombies) directed the second story in which a military presence rules a town through violence, fear and outright racism. Yet when a werewolf starts to be sighted, even their might isn’t enough to stop it. This segment has some of the most gut-churning werewolf scenes I’ve ever seen, moments that look like barbecue-sauced infused blasts of muck, internal organs, peeling skin and always blood.

Marins directed and starred in the third story, a tale of exorcism gone wrong and the monster known as the Saci, which is a one-legged black man, always smoking a pipe and in a magical red hat that leaves behind a smell that never goes away. He appears and disappears in the form of a dust devil and has the power to grant wishes. Any small misfortune — even if a popcorn kernel fails to pop — is said to be caused by the Saci.

The final story is directed by Caetano (Encosto) has the ghost of a woman haunting a school, causing death after death that is hidden by being buried. The woman in charge of the school and this ghost are linked and that story is soon revealed.

I really had fun with this film. The credits are great with everyone seemingly overjoyed to work with Marins and when he is asked what it’s like to make a horror movie in Brazil, he answers, “Terrible.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

No, not that Trilogy of Terror.

This Brazilian movie creates new versions of stories that appeared on the TV series Além, Muito Além do Além (Beyond, Much Beyond the Beyond): “O Acordo” (The Agreement), “A Procissão dos Mortos” (Procession of Dead), and “Pesadelo Macabro” (Macabre Nightmare).

In the first segment, “O Acordo” (The Agreement), a mother discovers that her daughter has an incurable disease, so she offers her soul to Satan himself. They ask her to bring them back a virgin. This segment was directed by Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias.

The second story is “A Procissão dos Mortos” (Procession of Dead), which was directed by Luiz Sérgio Person. A young boy’s father is the only person brave enough to face the ghosts that haunt the village.

Finally — and most spectacularly — “Pesadelo Macabro” (Macabre Nightmare) is about a young man who is afraid of being buried alive, which is exactly and to no surprise what happens. This leads to tons of scenes of women being whipped, lizards, bugs and, yes, a premature burial that all feel like they’re the exact kind of bad trip that schoolteachers warned you that those blue acid star temporary tattoos would give you if any drug dealer tried to give you free acid, which I don’t think has ever happened ever. This was directed by José Mojica Marins, who we all know as Coffin Joe, and it lives up to exactly the kind of mania you expect from this man. He was actually the host of the TV show these stories came from for 21 years and sadly, hardly any tapes of them survive.

John (Chris Parnell, who should be in more movies) has lost everything. His wife (Tiffany Morgan; who before she dies reminds him that she would also like to be known as mother), his son Kyle (John Reynolds) and his beloved ’71 muscle car. Oh yeah — his newspaper is also bought out by Chaz AF (Julio Torrez) and turned into a website. John is immediately fired. And then he’s knocked off a bridge by influencer Jak-E Wak-E (Carmen Christopher) to what looks like his death.

But nope. He survives in the woods and becomes stronger, remembering who did this to him. Now, he’s going to become the Millenial Killer.

If you liked the Tubi original Pastacolypse, this shares much of the same creative team. It was directed by Jason Shwartz and written by Sam Taggart. It feels like they had several seasons of material and suddenly worked it all into this movie, including a team of millennial supervillains, a new romance for John with a former co-worker who is Generation X, John meeting a millennial he actually likes (but not for long) and tons of violence.

I laughed a few times during this and if you have an open mind, you probably will too.

You can watch this on Tubi.