The reviews on this feature film writing and directing debut by Disney wildlife documentarian David Fowler have been of the middling-to-hated variety. And I must admit that, after my first watch, I didn’t care for Welcome to the Circle either — and since I couldn’t find a positive in the film, I wasn’t going to write this review.

But obviously, there’s something happening here — or you wouldn’t be reading this — in the Don Coscarelli-mindfuck frames that I just couldn’t put my finger on my first go-around. For this film’s raison d’etre isn’t flying Chinese cuisinart harmony balls: it’s mannequins and masks and fucked up human-strung marionettes. And it wasn’t until Sam, our Mix Master General of the Movie-themed Drink Blender, rolled out another “Giallo Week” of even deeper Italian and Spanish obscurities*, and my sitting down for a two-day Nazisplotiation binge as I geared up for my review of Naomi Holwill’s everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask genre document Fascism on a Thread: The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema, that the celluloid memory centers of my analog cortex streamed across the synapses in hallucinatory harmony.

There are just some movies that require a second run through the digital sprocket rollers. The FUBAR’d world of Welcome to the Circle is one of those films.

Now Giallo and Nazisploitation films may not — at all — be at the ambiguity-open-to-your-interpretation roots of Fowler’s retro-madness, but somewhere along the line, between the feel-good Disney docs, he’s ingested his share of films from both genres and they somehow bled into his Final Draft QWERTY-ing.

We’ve got the mannequin and mask creepiness of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil and Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo. There’s Coscarelli’s they-don’t-make-any-sense surrealistic nightmares of the Phantasm franchise. There’s Bigas Luna’s snail-slithering corkscrews of Anguish. There’s the haunting of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls with his mannequin-like souls in their undead waltz. There’s the twisted, pseudo-Nazi ideology that makes no sense to anyone but its we-can-do-whatever-we-want followers. Then there’s those narrative time jumps (which seems to annoy the streamer-critics the most) where you don’t know if the character’s insane, trapped in a dream, or the owls are hootin’ down at the Ambrose Bierce bridge of reincarnation sighs.

As the film begins, we meet Greg, a father who takes Samantha, his young daughter, on a bonding camping trip; they’re subsequently attacked by a bear. However, amid the film’s unfurling ambiguity and surrealism, one questions if the bear attack was even real — and if the attack was, instead, in human form, since cults need children to nurture.

Greg comes to wake in the warming bosom of The Circle, a backwoods cult led by a Matthew, a white-suited Ron L. Hubbard-type that deals in philosophical, circular logic: reasoning that means nothing to know one but the cult’s members — whose numbers are dwindling.

And here’s where those mannequins and masks come in . . . and time starts a-jumpin’.

As Samatha’s assimilated into the cult, she’s obsessed with wearing a happy-face mask given to her by the cult’s flower-child rhetoric-spewing handmaidens Sky and Lotus Cloud. In fact, anytime someone is absorbed into the cult — by their own will or by force — they “personality” is replaced by a doppelganger mask. And as the cult numbers dwindle — by escape or death (we think) — they’re replaced by doppelganger mannequins that, (again, we think; keeping with the film’s circular mindfuckery), represents the lost, human soul . . . or the zombie-like autonomic nature of man . . . and your own mindfuck opinions, may vary.

Also pulled into the time loops and identity shifts is Grady, a professional cult deprogrammer hired by a husband and sister-in-law to abduct the cult’s third hippy-handmaiden, Rebekah.

Then there’s the right-back-where-you-started multi-dimensional travel and whacked-out hallucinations of the Tallman “Space Gate” variety that occur in the rural lair-shack of perpetually reincarnating Percy Stephens, an evil Baron Munchausen-styled world adventurer — (cursed to?) a lair that, you always end up where you left. As with Rudolf Enich Raspe’s literary hero, Percy’s a master sportsman, world-class deep sea navy diver, and world traveler (and master B.S. artist) whose life experiences led to his creation of The Circle, a supernatural cult with twisted moral standards. (Luckily, Percy wasn’t a product of Nazi Germany — but he did subjugate some African natives along the way, at least according to the creepy, morphing black and white wall photos hung around the compound, and per everyone’s Ringu-jittery mindbending flashbacks — or this backwoods camp would be a backwoods Nazi-prison farm with Sploitation-atrocities o’ plenty.)

Does young Samantha escape and is Rebekah rescued? Yep. But Rebekah’s got a shite-eating-grin on her face as Samantha fans the pages of the self-made book, “The Adventures of Percy Stephens.” So, will The Circle, continue?

All in all, I’m glad I gave Welcome to the Circle a well-deserved second watch. And it’s well worth your streaming it the first time. But hey, we’re the guys who loved The Invisible Mother, She’s Allergic to Cats, and Under the Silver Lake — that almost everybody else hated and didn’t see. So what do us film reviewing schlemiels and schlimazels of Hasenpfeffer Incorporated in the backwoods of Allegheny County know? We’d tell you that the Giallo cycle was misunderstood by mainstream Americana, with the genre’s mixtures of murder, the supernatural, Entomology, and junk sciences (and, in The Circle’s case: junk philosophy) wrongly critiqued as “style over substance” and “lacking in narrative logic.” And you’d say, “Poppycock.”

And that’s your loss, for you just missed out on a great introduction to a new voice in horror with this debut work from David Fowler.

After a making its streaming debut in October 2020 on various online platforms, Welcome to the Circle makes its January 2021 debut as a free-with-ads stream on Tubi. You can learn more about the film at Artsploitation Films and follow the film at its official Facebook page.

* In June of last year, we had our first, month-long Giallo blowout, which we recapped with our “Exploring: Giallo” featurette with review links to over 50 films. Yep, the blood runs Tallman-yellow in our veins. And there’s nothing like starting off a New Year with Giallos; you can catch up on our reviews with our three-part “Giallo Week Wrap Ups”: Recap 1, Recap 2. and Recap 3.

Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request from the director or a P.R firm. We discovered this film on our own and we truly enjoyed the film.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.

Author’s Note: Due to the controversial subject matter of this film, please note this is a film review that addresses the creative art of filmmaking only. This review is not a political dissertation in support of or in contradiction of any sociopolitical belief system and is not intended to incense any reader regarding social or free speech/opinion issues. This review was written to expose a documentary film that attempts to help the viewer reach an understanding regarding the creative development of its subject-film genre.

Filmmaker Naomi Holwill is one of us. She’s a film dork at heart and, like most of us, isn’t content with just watching a film; her fascination runs deeper. She read all of the film books and watched all of the DVD supplements and listened to the commentary tracks, like us. She needed to know what made Spanish filmmaker Jorge Grau and Italian purveyors Luigi Cozzi, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio Martino tick. She wanted to know why the Emmanuelle franchise became a phenomenon.

And she became a filmmaker that is everywhere . . . and nowhere. She’s the dark lady of cinema.

If you’re a cult cinema aficionado of all things Spanish and Italian and horror and sci-fi — chances are you’ve watched more than several of her 150-plus feature-length documentaries and featurettes (as a producer, editor, and director) from her Scotland-based High Rising Productions that, since 2009, is responsible for producing a wide array of supplements for internationally-released Blu-ray and DVD reissues of most of your favorite films from the ’60s through the ’80s.

You want to know more about the influences of Norman Jewison’s Rollerball*? She’s gave us the feature-length documentary supplement From Rollerball to Rome (2020) (which needs its own, separate release). You want to know more about seventies sex symbol Me Me Lai, one of the very first British-Asian pin-ups? Naomi Holwill was the first filmmaker to tell Lai’s story with the acclaimed Me Me Lai Bites Back (2018). And the list goes on and on: Norman J. Warren’s directing career**, Cannibal films, Giallo films, Blaxsploitation, Roger Corman, Jack Hill, George Romero, Slashers, Italian Zombies, and Italian Exorcism films. Since 2009, Naomi Holwill, along with her High Rising partner Calum Waddell, have left no filmmaker, actor, director, or genre stone from our beloved Drive-In ’70s and VHS ’80s unturned.

It was only a matter of time until High Rising Productions — with Waddell as writer and Holwill as director — would tackle the taboo sub-genre of exploitation and sexploitation films (and women-in-prison flicks) known as Nazisploitation: films dealing with World War II-era Nazi’s — both men and women — behaving very, very badly in concentration camps; films churned out in quick succession in the 1970s upon the box-office success of Don Edmonds (Terror on Tour) Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) starring Dyanne Thorne (Point of Terror).

Severin Films contracted Rising High to produce Fascism on a Thread, a feature-length documentary on the genre for inclusion on its May 2019 Blu-ray edition of Paolo Solvay’s The Beast in Heat (aka La Bestia in Calore, aka SS Hell Camp). Included are interviews with genre stars Dyanne “Ilsa” Thorne and Malissa “Elsa” Longo, along with the genre filmmakers Mariano Caiano (Nazi Love Camp 27), Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter), Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment Love Camp, SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell), Bruno Mattei (Private House of the SS, Women’s Camp 119) and Rino Di Silvestro (Deported Women on the SS Special Section). Other filmmakers and films examined are Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty, Last Orgy of the Third Reich by Cesare Canevari, Alain Payet’s Love Train for the SS, and the more serious and better-made (but the most grotesque-watch of them all), Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo’s Pasolini.

Granted, most Nazisploitation films are admittedly more sensationalistic, but when it comes to Pasolini’s inclusion in the genre, you’re dealing with a film that isn’t using Nazism or Fascism as window dressing. Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom is a masterwork in the horrifying lessons of the absolute corruption of power in the same vein that Otakar Vavra’s Witchhammer (1970) controversially addressed the issue, a film that, itself, was bastardized with a quick succession of scandalous “Witch Trail” films, such as the West German-produced Mark of the Devil, aka Witches Tortured til They Bleed (1970), its sequel Mark of the Devil II, aka Witches Are Violated and Tortured to Death (1973), and the more reserved, Gothic-slanted AIP film that inspired the production of those films: Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, aka The Conqueror Worm (1968). Paul Naschy’s “theme” on the corruption of wealthy libertines, in his pseudo-zombie film, The People Who Own the Dark (1975), also has a connection to Pasolini’s art-horror film statement regarding Italy’s fascist state — and their complicity in the rise of Nazism.

While brutally squeamish — but not gratuitous: there’s a point to it all, really — Salo and these works are inspired by the infamous, power mad, pre-Nazisploitation exploits of the Marquis de Sade; which was the question asked by Naschy: “What if the Marquis de Sade existed in the nuclear, Cold War-era of the 1970s?” And that theme — which also adds a message about man’s obsession with beauty and youth — prevails in Fruit Chan’s nerve-inducing masterpiece, Dumplings (2004). These films may not be for the puritanical or faint of heart, but they are statements on how far one will steep into the Seven Deadly Sin for their own personal gain that need to be told. However, that message — and any sociopolitical connotations — is lost in most Nazisploitation films (the worst offenders being Lee Frost’s 1969 knockoff, Love Camp 7, and Garrone’s 1976 romp, SS Experiment Love Camp), so you’ve been forewarned.

When it comes to a quintessential encapsulation of the derided ’70s Drive-In genre that later became an ’80s VHS-based “video nasty” genre, Fascism on a Thread is it. If you’re a film dork that needs to know more and, as with our friend Mike “McBeardo” McPadden*˟, you’re on a quest to consume every Nazisploitation and Italian cannibal film ever made, Naomi Holwill’s directorial effort is a perfect introduction to exploring the genre as you wrap your head around “why” it ever existed in the first place.

After being offered on Amazon Prime as a separate-from-the-Blu stream from The Beast in Heat, you can now watch Fascism on a Thread for the first time as a free-with-ads stream courtesy of TubiTV. We’ve also since reviewed Naomi Holwill’s exploration of the Italian cannibal genre with Me Me Lai Bites Back (2021).

There’s also several fan-complied compilation lists to help you navigate through the genre’s films on the IMDb and Letterboxd. Other films of the genre we’ve reviewed are Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977) and Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977), along with the ’80s zombie variants of Shock Waves (1977), Gamma 693 (1981), and Zombie Lake (1981). Then there’s the rape-revenge inversion of Mad Foxes (1981). If you’re in a NaziZom binge-mood and want to see a few of the genre’s predecessors, you can check out They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1964) and its fellow Nazi scientist-cum-world-conquest villains in She Demons (1958), The Flesh Eaters (1964), and Flesh Feast (1970). To a lesser extent, there’s the Nazi we-never-see ghosts of Death Ship (1980).

Click through the images for the reviews.

* We did our own month-long examination of all of those post-apoc Rollerball offsprings with our two-part “Atomic Dustin” and our three-part “Fucked Up Futures” examinations — both features offer review links to over 100 films of every Italian and Philippine end-of-the-world romp you can imagine — and beyond.

** We’re reviewing Norman J. Warren‘s resume in June 2021.

*˟ We had the pleasure of interviewing Mike “McBeardo” McPadden in April 2019, upon the release of Teen Movie Hell: A Crucible of Coming-of-Age Comedies from Animal House to Zapped!, his latest filmpedia follow up to Heavy Metal Movies.

Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request from the director or a P.R firm. We discovered this film on our own and we truly enjoyed the film. And thanks for making this one of our most-successful posts with over 650-hits since January! We hope you enjoyed the film as much as we did!

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.

Back in the pre-Internet and pre-cable analog days of the “Big Three” networks, it seemed as if it was a weekly occurrence, as we watch the nightly news on ABC, CBS, and NBC, that yet another airline skyjacking, aka hijacking, occurred. It was ’70s de rigueur for criminals to make buck or advance their political-personal causes. As a June 2013 Wired investigative article written by Brendan I. Koerner tells us, between 1961 and 1973, nearly 160 of hijacks occurred in American airspace.

As this week’s reviews of “airline disaster” TV movies has shown, the “Big Three” TV networks, along with cable channels like USA and HBO — as well as the film studios — knew plot fodder when they saw it. And when Universal discovered box office gold with Airport — and ignited the ’70s disaster movie genre — with their 1970 adaption of Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel of the same name, you’d knew there be more of the same.

While Paramount Studios’ television division was first out of the gate with their 1971 CBS-TV broadcast movie Terror in the Sky (which is a cousin to Airport by way of Arthur Hailey’s airline-plotted tales), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios wasted no time getting into business with producer Walter Seltzer; Seltzer optioned David Harper’s late-’60s best-seller Hijacked and began working the material under the titles Hijacked and Airborne.

At the time, Seltzer made four movies with Charlton Heston: The War Lord (1965), Will Penny (1967), Number One (1969), and The Omega Man (1971), so Seltzer had his leading man. (The duo would also make Soylent Green and The Last Hard Men in 1973 and 1976, respectively.) For Heston’s leading lady-lead stewardess, Seltzer brought on three-time lifetime Golden Globe-nominee (also of The Neptune Factor and Jackson County Jail) Yvette Mimieux, who co-starred with Heston in Diamond Head (1962).

During a routine Global Airways Minneapolis-bound flight, a passenger (Susan Dey of The Partridge Family) discovers a lipsticked-scrawl bomb threat on a first-class bathroom mirror urging the flight divert to Anchorage, Alaska. A jazz cellist (ex-NFL’er Rosey Grier) believes his jittery military seatmate (James Brolin of The Amityville Horror) is responsible. The rest of the cast of passengers features Walter Pidgeon as a U.S. Senator and Mariette Hartley as a pregnant woman in crisis-induced labor (Earth II), along with Ken Swofford (Black Roses) and Claude Akins (General Aldo from Battle for the Planet of the Apes). And a suspenseful, Murphy’s Law-thriller mix of failed hijacker subduing, radio and radar snafus, fuel loss, near air collisions, and violation of Soviet airspace — as we say around the Allegheny wilds of B&S’ offices — ensues.

Say what you will about these old, ’70s airline disaster flicks, but Skyjacked cleaned up at the box office, becoming one of MGM’s biggest hits of 1972 alongside Shaft and Kansas City Bomber. And Heston knew a hit genre when he saw one: he jumped back in the cockpit for Airport 1975. And he stuck with the disaster-thriller genre with Earthquake (1974) and Two-Minute Warning (1976) — and they also cleaned up at the box office. Oh, and Chuck hit the cockpit for a one-more-third time with ABC-TV’s Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232 (1992).

You can watch the trailer for Skyjacked and watch the film on You Tube HERE and HERE.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.