ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. You can listen to her podcast at https://thecinemajunction.com. 

Her latest book is Japanese Cult Cinema: Best of the Second Golden Age. She writes for Horror & Sons and Drive-in Asylum. She has also appeared on the podcasts Japan on Film, Making Tarantino, Making Scorsese, The Rad Revivalhouse and contributes to Cinemaforce. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or follow her on Instagram @jennxlondon. 

April 20: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

An ambitious regional horror movie that asks two good questions. “What if the little Zuni fetish warrior doll from Trilogy of Terror came from a tribe of hundreds more rampaging dolls?” And, “What if some survivors of a sunken ship got stranded on an island inhabited by the little blighters?” 

It doesn’t matter that the island is in the North Atlantic instead of a country in Africa. It’s entirely plausible that these industrious creatures could have built themselves a boat and explored the world, establishing tiny populations wherever they could find enough food. They even have their own religion. These are just some of the reasons I love this film. 

Other reasons include: 

1. Tiny wooden dolls with glowing eyes swinging on vines. 
2. Tiny wooden dolls with glowing eyes biting right through a castaway’s trousers to the soft, chewy center of the calf. 
3. Tiny wooden dolls praying to their wooden doll deity. 
4. Castaway getting his face melted off trying to drink from an acid pond. 
5. A body picked clean to the bones. 

Shot in Connecticut on a miniscule budget, the director cleverly shows the sinking of the 1920s pleasure cruiser and subsequent journey to the island in quick cuts during the opening credits. This leaves plenty of time for the characters to walk around in the woods, pick berries and argue with zeal. Yes, there’s a lot of walking in this movie. 

We even get a know-it-all character very similar to Harry Cooper in Night of the Living Dead. Then we have Ginger, Mary-Ann, Gilligan….Oh. Wait. To be honest, I can’t remember any of the castaways’ names in this movie. I was too blown away by the puppetry and special effects. The puppets are the stars. The filmmakers truly did make something out of nothing here. It’s a lot of fun. 

The attack scenes make this movie. The first attack starts at approximately 32 minutes into the film. The monsters wait until our group is fast asleep by the campfire. Cathy takes first watch. She notices a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness. Then another…and another…. until there are too many to count. A very effective sequence. By the time she calls for help, it’s too late. 

The monsters launch their hunting party into action. Needle-like fangs sink into shoulders, necks and asses. I watched this scene 3 times before writing this review and it gets better every time. My favorite shot features one creature swinging down on a vine while two others cross into the foreground in front of him. Excellent stuff.

The next day, the monsters push the castaways’ boat out to sea and execute a series of daylight attacks. They patter through the underbrush, scale trees and leap onto their prey until most of the humans are picked off. Along the way, the beasties lose a few of their own, but it never slows them down. 

They stop their hunting activities just long enough to pray to their totem god. Likely paying homage to their fallen comrades and giving thanks for their delicious bounty. 

The fact that we see some of their culture showcases the filmmakers’ enthusiasm. I was fascinated by this scene. I wanted to see more of their daily lives on the island. Do they live in little huts? Do they have hunting strategy meetings around a tiny wooden table? Answering all my questions would be giving too much of the mystery away and cost too much. 

In the end, two of the castaways escape the island when a rowboat with two men passes by. I was hoping for an aquatic attack but that would be too ambitious even for this film. 

One of the men asks, “What were those things?” We are given no answer. I’d like to think the tiny creatures made their way back to the other bodies and finished feasting. 

In later years, these valiant hunters would be revered in their tribe. When future generations of beast creatures tucked their offspring into their beds at night, they’d tell them about, “The Great Hunt.”  

Vinegar Syndrome released a restored Blu Ray version, or you can watch the full movie here. I’ve cued it to the first attack scene. I’m totally in love with these little guys. Enjoy! 

April 20: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Do you think Jessica Harper ever wonders, “Could I not be in a cult movie?” 

In The Evictors, Harper brings that signature wide-eyed vulnerability to the humid, claustrophobic world of 1940s Louisiana. She plays Ruth Watkins, the wife of Ben (Michael Parks). They’ve just learned that every couple who has ever lived in their new home has been killed since the Monroes had a shootout all the way back in 1928. Every time Ben goes away on business, his wife is threatened by a shadowy figure who turns out to be one of the Monroes. In fact, everyone ends up being one, including their real estate agent, Jake Rudd (Vic Morrow). 

Despite teaching Ruth how to shoot, Ben may have taught her a little too well, as she thinks he’s the man who has been bothering her. She shoots and kills him just as she learns that Jake is Todd Monroe and that he’s been reselling the Monroe house over and over again to unsuspecting young couples, while his sister-in-law Anna/Olie e befriends the new tenants to learn more about them, and their brother Dwayne Monroe (Dennis Fimple) does the killing. Then Jake buys the house back, splits the money with his family and it all starts over again. But during an argument, Dwayne murders Olie and then goes after Ruth. Jake kills him.

In the bleakest of turns, the film skips forward five years to find Ruth hasn’t just survived. She’s been assimilated. Now insane and living as Jake’s wife, she’s become a willing gear in the Monroe family’s murderous machine.

Director Charles B. Pierce was the king of drive-in docudrama. While he’s best known for The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, this shows a more polished, albeit cynical, side of his filmmaking. Unlike Hollywood slashers, Pierce’s films feel lived-in. The sweat, the heavy Southern air, and the period-accurate 1940s costuming give it a grit that feels more like a True Crime magazine come to life than a standard horror flick. That may be because he was inspired to make this after reading a detective magazine article about a Kansas family who murdered somebody trying to evict them.

This was one of the final gasps for American International Pictures, the legendary studio that fueled the drive-ins. Its financial failure signaled the beginning of the end of an era for independent regional distribution.

Pierce considered it his most downbeat film and told Fangoria that it had a dark ending because “I probably just didn’t have any other way to end it.”

April 19: What Happened to Jayne — A movie starring Jayne Mansfield.

I’ve seen almost every movie that Jayne had a major role in, so I’ve been making my way through her early roles. In Illegal, she plays Angel O’Hara, a singer whose testimony is crucial to the movie’s conclusion. 

The main star is Edward G. Robinson, who plays Victor Scott, a district attorney who has risen from the slums to become a courtroom star. He was mentored by an older man who made him promise to watch over his daughter, attorney Ellen Miles (Nina Foch). She’s in love with him, he’s in love with the job and therefore encourages her to marry another man, Ray Borden (Hugh Marlowe). 

When his spectacular courtroom abilities lead to an innocent man named Edwqard Clary (DeForest Kelley!) being put to death, he decides to give up the law and hits the bottle. While in court for a public drunkenness charge, he saves a man accused of murder by knocking out a witness, Mr. Taylor (Henry Kulky), who claimed that he couldn’t be taken out by a man the size of the accused. Now a civil lawyer, Victor ends up working for one of his former enemies, Frank Garland (Albert Dekker), a mob boss. Somehow, Garland keeps getting out of every case and it seems like there’s a leak. Spoiler — Ray isn’t the nice guy he seems to be and nearly kills Ellen, who shoots him in self-defense. However, everyone thinks she’s the leak, so Victor has to defend the woman he’s always been in love with. 

Robinson owned an amazing contemporary art collection used to decorate this film, including impressionist works by Gauguin, Degas, Duran and Gladys Lloyd. He was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time. Robinson had been graylisted, meaning that while not officially banned, major studios were hesitant to hire him. This is why a titan of cinema was working for a smaller budget at Warner Bros.

Based on the play The Mouthpiece by Frank J. Collins, this was directed by Lewis Allen, best known for the classic ghost story The Uninvited. It was written by W.R. Burnett and James R. Webb. Burnett wrote the novel Little Caesar, which made Robinson a star in 1931. Having them reunite for Illegal was a poetic, full-circle moment for the film noir genre.

If you’re someone like me who enjoys seeing props from other movies show up in a film, keep an eye out for the Maltest Falcon. You can see it on a bookcase when Victor enters the office of DA Ralph Ford.

While Jayne Mansfield’s role as Angel O’Hara is relatively brief, it was a calculated career move. At this point, she was being groomed by Warner Bros. as a blonde bombshell alternative to Marilyn Monroe. Her performance of “Too Close for Comfort” (though dubbed by Bonnie Lou Williams) served as her screen test for the world. It proved she could command the screen with the same va-va-voom energy that would make her a household name a year later in The Girl Can’t Help It. Seeing her play a canary (mob slang for a singer/witness) against a gritty veteran like Robinson creates a striking tonal shift in the film, moving from the dark, smoky corners of a courtroom drama to the glitzy, dangerous world of the nightclub.

April 18: King Yourself! — Pick a movie released by Crown International Pictures. Here’s a list!

Created and produced by Hisao Masuda and financed by The Arthur Davis Company, this film explores a range of Japanese martial arts and the abilities of some of the most famous martial arts masters of the time.

We kick things off with a terrifyingly efficient demo of the Japanese sword. It’s sleek, it’s sharp and yet Okinawan farmers learned how to stop them. These guys didn’t have katanas, so they turned their pitchforks and gardening tools into instruments of absolute destruction. We meet Teruo Hayashi, the Karate-do legend, who shows us how this Okinawan weaponry was used before Fujimoto, the Human Sledgehammer, fought a train and karate-chopped beer bottles. Then, Suzuki shows off his nunchaku skills.

We go from judo to the elegant but lethal Naginata-do. Often associated with female practitioners, it’s a master class in reach and timing. We also meet the legendary Gozo Shioda, the founder of Yoshinkan Aikido; watch Shinto practitioners fire walking and see sumo stable training with Takamiyama. 

Then, we head back into the world of Teruo Hayashi, who’s here to remind us that kata isn’t just a synchronized dance for a trophy. It’s a rehearsal for a funeral. The narrator, who sounds like he’s seen a few things he can’t forget, doesn’t mince words: Karate is severe and cruel.

The film takes a detour into the connection between Zen Buddhism and Budo as we watch Shuji Matsushita sitting in zazen when—WHACK—he takes a strike from an abbot’s kyosaku, the encouragement stick. It’s a wake-up call for the soul that’ll make you glad you’re just watching from your couch. Then, Taizaburo Nakamura steps up for the film’s absolute highlight. Using slow-motion footage that feels like it belongs in a Peckinpah flick, the movie shows how fast a sword cut is.

Before the credits roll, we get a peek at the forge of Amada Akitsugu, a national living treasure. Seeing a nihonto sword born from fire and a hammer is a reminder that these aren’t just weapons. They’re masterpieces.

If you have any interest in fighting, this is a movie for you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 17: Fake Bat Appreciation Day —Watch a movie with a fake bat in it.

It’s Fake Bat Appreciation Day, a holiday I just made up to celebrate the kind of cinema where the strings are visible, the wings are made of felt and the actors have to pretend they aren’t being pelted with a taxidermy project gone wrong. I wish I could watch A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin again so I could delight in the bats in it, but this starts with an animated bat and has a bat-on-a-string moment that lasts an eternity.

I’ve heard a lot of people say some bad things about this movie, and man, I realize I have no taste because I loved every single moment of it. I could go back right now and watch it again, which I can’t say I’ve done for any movie in a long time. 

Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney, who played the Lone Ranger’s nephew Dan Reid on TV) has gone straight. He’s moved to a mining town to find a good woman and settle down. Well, he actually stole a good woman and made her his fiancée. He’s efficient like that. 

That girl is Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), and she’s a catch: she’s cute, she knows how to work a Winchester and her family owns the local mine. She’s also caught the eye of Count Dracula, played by the legendary John Carradine. I love Skinny Dracula, which is what I call any Carradine Dracula. This one is dumb enough to hide out in a silver mine when silver can kill him. What are you thinking? Then again, this Dracula also walks around during the day, so who are we to put limits on him?

Dracula decides to pose as Betty’s uncle to get close to her, but he’s got competition. Not just Billy, but also Dan “Red” Thorpe (Bing Russell, father of Kurt!), the man Billy cucked to get Betty. Red is so blinded by rage that he doesn’t even care that a vampire is snooping around his Western hometown; he just wants Billy dead.

This was shot at the same time as the movie it played double features with, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, both directed by William Beaudine as his last films. It took eight days to film both.

Carradine said of this movie: “I have worked in a dozen of the greatest, and I have worked in a dozen of the worst. I only regret Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Otherwise, I regret nothing.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 16: Dead Fad — Find a fad, look for a movie about it and share.

Before it was a standardized extreme sport with professional leagues, paintball was part of a larger, slightly more chaotic campus fad called The Assassination Game. Students would stalk each other through dorm halls and libraries with suction-cup darts or water pistols. Gotcha! took this localized craze and elevated it into a Cold War spy thriller, suggesting that if you could navigate a UCLA library without getting hit by a paint pellet, you were basically halfway to being a CIA operative.

Jonathan Moore (Anthony Edwards) is a veterinary student at UCLA and an expert at Gotcha, a game where students hunt down one another with paintball guns. Look for the LJN tie-in line of Entertech line of paintball and water guns and the NES game, Gotcha! The Sport, which wouldn’t come out until 1987 and is only the paintball tournament from the beginning of this, but yes, it is a tie-in game.

Jonathan and his roommate, Manolo (Nick Corri), travel to Paris during spring break, where Jonathan meets Sasha Banicek (Linda Fiorentino) and loses his virginity. I mean, that’s a big jump from nerdy paintball-playing virgin to aggressive cuddling with the star of The Last Seduction, but good for him. Of course, there are all sorts of complications, as she’s being tracked by Russian spies. Turns out she’s a CIA agent from Pittsburgh.

Shout-out to this movie for featuring “Two Tribes” and “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on the soundtrack.

Gotcha! was directed by Jeff Kanew, who also filmed V.I. Warshawski, Tough Guys, Troop Beverly Hills and Revenge of the Nerds. It was written by Dan Gordon (Tank, Let There Be Light, Passenger 57).

This movie is not Tag: The Assassination Game, nor is it Paintball Massacre or Masterblaster.

I definitely rented this from 7-11 off a spinner rack as a kid and was shocked by how much I liked it. Maybe I, too, dreamed of being a nerd spy, which never happened.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. You can listen to her podcast at https://thecinemajunction.com. Her latest book is Japanese Cult Cinema: Best of the Second Golden Age. She writes for Horror & Sons and Drive-in Asylum. She has also appeared on the podcasts Japan on Film, Making Tarantino, Making Scorsese, The Rad Revivalhouse and contributes to Cinemaforce. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or follow her on Instagram @jennxlondon. 

April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.

The movie version of the on-again-off-again OG of movie riffing TV shows. It’s shorter than any single episode and features human Mike Nelson, robots Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo and Gypsy all stuck on The Satellite of Love forced to watch “bad movies” for an evil scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester. Yes, he’s named after the scientist is War of the Worlds. Which is one of the reasons I fell in love with the show. 

I’m probably not the best writer to write objectively about this film because I have been a huge fan of the show since around 1994 when I discovered it at midnight on Comedy Central. I worked evenings and nights for better part of the e1990s and 2000s and the first 10 seasons of this show felt like it was written for me. 

A girl brought up on Curse of the Werewolf, Curse of Bigfoot and Track of the Moon Beast. I never have and do not think of many of the films riffed on MST3K as “bad.” I have great affection for the 1960s Gamera and Godzilla films and all the other films they riffed. However, I do acknowledge that is not typical audience thinking. I’m a cult movie hound and MST3K’s reference-dropping humor got me through more hard times than I care to divulge here. Life if just too short to take any movie too seriously. 

MST3K: The Movie answers the question, “…if you’re wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts…”  within the first five minutes on the SOL’s bigger budget version of the bridge. The first time I saw Tom Servo hover float down into the frame using his hover skirt, it felt almost as magical as that moment in The Muppet Movie when a whole generation of kids got to finally feast their eyes on Kermit’s fully functional legs. 

This time, Dr. Forrester (minus his sidekick Frank) sends his subjects This Island Earth. I love this movie, riffed or unriffed and I do not consider it an insult to point out that the aliens have foreheads that “grow like the mighty oak.” They do! 

The boys’ riff on This Island Earth does not quite measure up to the show’s best episodes, but it is a worthwhile entry in the canon for fans and new viewers alike. Some of the references feel a bit dated in 2026 but the Top Gun reference was fresh as ever. My favorite riffs all involve Mike doing Rex Reason’s voice. “Joe! I’m in one of these boxes! FIND ME!!!” 

This movie disappeared quickly. I don’t even remember it playing in L.A. in the summer of ’96. The show’s fanbase has resurrected this show no fewer than 3 times and we’re about to get new episodes from the Sci-Fi Channel era. My personal favorite. 

The movie is available streaming on Amazon, Apple and of course, you can find it on DVD so you physical media folks can watch it on your home-built interocitor.  Here’s how you build one: 

Welp….I’m off to the local Head-Butt Days festival to meet up with Brak. Peace out. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey. His April Movie Thon list is here.

April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.

“Pleasure, the inevitable byproduct of our civilization. A new world where our only preoccupation will be…how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your times, my young friends, is that you might get exactly what you want.”–some random guy leading The Monkees through some sort of factory. Was this the factory where The Monkees were initially manufactured?

I was a huge fan of The Monkees during their, thanks to MTV rerunning their television show, resurgence in the mid 1980s. I quickly scooped up any cassette tape I could find. On a road trip back to Louisiana from Ohio, I subjected my poor aunt to their debut record on a loop. Looking back, I’m surprised that she didn’t intentionally drive off into a ditch after the seventh time hearing Davy Jones warble I Wanna Be Free.

I did not have any idea that The Monkees were considered a prefabricated cash in on Beatlemania. Even after purchasing a replica magazine originally published in the 1960s, where the group was dubbed The Pre-Fab Four, it never occurred to me that The Monkees could possibly be seen as subpar artists.

My love for The Monkees did not die out when their second wave of fame ended perhaps prematurely after more intra-band disputes (turns out the relationships among the members were often volatile). As a teenager, I was an avid VHS collector. I loved receiving those catalogs in the mail from Movies Unlimited. And it was through one of those catalogs that I discovered The Monkees starred in a major motion picture (co-written by Jack Nicholson no less) entitled Head. The VHS was a striking yellow. The members of The Monkees seemingly suspended in mid-air, with some sort of spiral in the background. I immediately mailed in my order form, anxiously awaiting this tape to be sent to me.

After watching Head, I instantly began gaslighting myself into thinking that the film was good. Great even. Sure, it was different from any other film I had seen up to that point. There was no plot. The songs were not as poppy as I was accustomed to. But this film had to be great, right? I tried to get my friends to watch it and like it. They were less than interested, not making it more than 10 minutes before insisting that I turn it off. Eventually, I began to come to the realization that I was simply fooling myself–Head was a flop.

Fast forward many years. Once I had kids of my own, I did what any good parent does–indoctinate them. Force them to like the things I liked when I was their age (not just The Monkees, but also Family Ties, Masters of the Universe and Jem and the Holograms). It worked! My daughter loved The Monkees as much as I did, only with a major crush on Davy Jones that I never had (I was more of a Peter Tork kind of guy).

And then, the unthinkable happened. Criterion released Head as part of their BBS: America Lost and Found boxset. And if it was worthy of inclusion in The Criterion Collection, surely that meant that the film was indeed the cinematic masterpiece I always deep down inside knew that it was.

After we watched all of the episodes of The Monkees, my daughter and I watched Head. I warned her that it was a bit surreal and did not have much of a plot. She said she enjoyed parts of it, particularly the scene between Davy Jones and Toni Basil, set to Daddy’s Song, an upbeat tune about a deadbeat father. That scene was always a favorite of mine too when I was younger.

But as I watched the film, I was awestruck. Everything was right there in front of me the whole time. Head was The Monkees suicide attempt. A chance to unshackle themselves from their teenage girl fanbase and embrace the counterculture. To be seen as more than four guys brought together by a television producer. They were true artists and musicians. The songs were perhaps the best songs in their entire catalog. But what should have been their opportunity to burst out of the literal and figurative box turned out to be a financial failure. The Beatles could go to India and return changed people, but The Monkees would forever be a band who did not play their own instruments on their records (even though they later did. And nobody seems to care that The Beach Boys (minus Brian Wilson) hardly played instruments on Pet Sounds).

Watching Head today, I realized how much of the film entered my daily vernacular. There are so many lines from the film I say quite often: “That song is pretty white” (Frank Zappa’s retort to Davy Jones after Daddy’s Song), “And the same thing goes for Christmas” (Michael Nesmith’s response after berating surprise birthday parties), “Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor” (Peter’s advice to Davy in the bathroom where Davy is experiencing issues with a psychedelic mirror). 

Am I probably still overrating Head all these years later? Maybe. Am I crazy for preferring this soundtrack album over anything The Beatles produced? Definitely. At any rate, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will remain a joke until The Monkees are inducted. My playlist will remain jam packed with plenty of tunes from The Monkees. And if I ever need to reach for a comfort movie that features the assassination of a Viet Cong officer, I need to long no further.

April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.

The 2007 prequel The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning is a curious artifact of the mid-2000s direct-to-video boom, arriving just two years after the big-budget Johnny Knoxville/Seann William Scott theatrical film. While the 2005 version felt like a glossy Hollywood blockbuster, The Beginning leans hard into the “teen sex comedy” trope that defined the post-American Pie era (which also got its own endless series of direct-to-video sequels).

When mischievous teenage cousins Bo (Jonathan Bennett, Mean Girls and so many holiday movies) and Luke Duke (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment) are put in the care of their Uncle Jesse (Willis Nelson) to work on his farm. But they soon learn that their uncle makes the best moonshine anywhere, and Boss Hogg (Christopher McDonald) plans to close down their family farm. Along with Cooter (Joel David Moore, Norm from the Avatar series) and their cousin Daisy (April Scott), they’ll save the day.

Directed by Robert Berlinger, whose career is mostly in TV, and written by Shane Morris (one of the writers of Frozen), this gets in everyone you want from the series, like Roscoe (Harland Williams), Enos (Adam Shulman), Lulu Hogg (Sherilynn Fenn) and even Gary Cole taking over for Waylon Jennings as the Balladeer. Originally airing on ABC Family, there were also R-rated and unrated versions.

Common Sense Media adds, “Parents need to know that this comedy has all the raunch of the American Pie movies and all the sexism of There’s Something About Mary. It encourages girls to base their worth on how they look and to use their appearance to manipulate men. It may also lead teen boys to drive recklessly. The film also says that General Robert E. Lee, who led the South in the Civil War, was “the greatest general,” which may disturb families of color. The film shows teens drinking and implies that teens have sex.”

Somehow, this has a Drive-By Truckers song on the soundtrack.

Otherwise, this is not my Dukes of Hazzard, which is probably so problematic now I shouldn’t have written that. I didn’t like that Daisy went from a nerd to a woman who learned that only through her beauty could she get what she wanted.

If you expect nothing from a direct-to-video and cable prequel/sequel to a failed reboot, you will be rewarded in abundance.

You can watch this on Tubi.