April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).

When a gorgeous photographer named Elys Trumbo (Eva Grimaldi, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) watches the leader (Bruno Bilotta, Demons 2) of a motorcycle gang kill someone, only one man can protect her: Robert Malone (Fred Williamson).

Were you expecting someone else?

Manny Cobretti?

Yes, this movie is Cobra but made in Italy by director Stelvio Massi (Arabella, Magnum Cop) and writer Danilo Massi (who yes, is his son, and also the writer of Convoy Busters).

Williamson starts the movie by stopping a swimming pool hostage situation with a shotgun — yes, there’s nudity, this was made in Italy — and is the kind of action hero who can look dangerous wearing a leather trenchcoat and still be secure enough to have a cat for a pet. He also has Chief Max Walker (Maurice Poli, Malombra, The Murder Secret) as his boss and has to save Max’s daughter. And wow! His daughter made the movie for me because she’s played by Sabrina Siani from The Throne of Fire.

What I love most about this movie is that the biker gang is in our reality but dress like they’re from after the end of the world. I guess Cobra did the same thing.

As good as Stallone’s movie was, there was never a sequel. Black Cobra got three, two directed by Edoardo Margheriti and another by Umberto Lenzi which has Bobby Rhodes in it.

If you dig this, check out the book “How the World Remade Hollywood” by Ed Glaser from McFarland Books. You can also read the interview that I did with Ed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

UPDATE: Thanks to Ed Glaser and Rutledal on Twitter, I learned that there’s a fifth Black Cobra movie, The Last Mission of Detective Malone, that is Godfrey Ho-style assembled from footage from Black Cobra 2 and Umberto Lenzi’s Bridge to Hell. You have no idea how happy this makes me.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

I don’t know how director and writer Linda Shaye went from Screwballs I and II and Crystal Heart to this movie, but here we are.

This is based on the Sheb Wooley song — one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater — and Sheb’s in here. So is Chubby Checker. And so is Little Richard, who used to scare the hell out of parents and now he’s playing the mayor in a kid film based on a novelty song and maybe that makes me a little sad.

But Flying Purple People Eater is packed with people who either were on the way down or on the way up. The kids staying with their grandparents are playing by Neil Patrick Harris and Thora Birch. Ned Beatty is their grandfather and Shelley Winters is his neighbor. And hey! There’s Peggy Lipton as the kid’s mom.

You know how not rock and roll this all is? It was a K-Tel International movie. Yes, K-Tel. The greatest hits records people. They also put out Pardon My Blooper and are still around today, releasing movies like Hotel Transylvania 2.

Other folks to look out for are Dustin Diamond and Jim Houghton, who was in Superstition and was Kenny Ward on Knots Landing.

Anyways, the story here is that the purple people eater forms a band with the kids and they end up playing shows to save old people from losing their homes from the evil Mr. Noodle (John Brumfield). It’s more Mac and Me than ET.  How does that alien being appear? All you have to do is play his old record. No one is afraid when it happens. Me? I would have been screaming.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

D. D. Winters is, as you can tell, Vanity, the same singer who brought us “Nasty Girl” and starred in Action Jackson. But here, you can call her D. D. Winters.

And yes, that Alfred Sole who directed this is the same person who made perhaps the best American giallo, Alice Sweet Alice.

She’s Tanya, a woman in love with Lobo (Richard Sargent), a violent artist. She dreams of a tropical island where she falls for Blue (Don McLeod in the suit made by Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and Steve Johnson, voiced by Donny Burns), who is a gorilla. Or maybe it’s really happening. Or maybe it’s all a dream. Or maybe it’s art.

McLeod was also T.C. Quist in The Howling and often shows up in strange roles, like the gorilla in Trading Places — I wonder if it was the same suit — as well as the oldest living Conehead in Coneheads, Zamora the ape in Mom, Can I Keep Her?, a gorilla — typecasting? — in the Sheena TV series and a statue in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special. He was also the famous ape that destroyed luggage in the American Tourister commercial.

Writer Pierre Brousseau was the PR guy and music coordinator for Visiting Hours. He also wrote Après-ski, which also has Mariette Lévesque in it, who is in this.

Sole also made Pandemonium and then one more TV movie, Cheeseball Presents, before giving up on directing and being a production designer. I always loved seeing his name pop up on Disney Channel movies and in episodes of Veronica Mars and Castle. Sadly, he died a little over a year ago, but he left behind a few great movies and some at least strange ones like this.

There’s nothing else like Tanya’s Island.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

Shot in caveman language and filmed in the Sierra de Órganos National Park in the town of Sombrerete in Mexico, Caveman is one weird movie.

It was directed and written by Carl Gottlieb, who wrote the first three Jaws movies, as well as The Jerk and Dr. Detroit. He only directed two other movies, the short The Absent-Minded Waiter and the Pethouse Video, Son of the Invisible Man, Art Sale and Peter Pan Theatre segments of Amazon Women On the Moon. This was written with Rudy De Luca, who went on to direct and write Transylvania 6-5000.

Yet I was so excited to see it as a kid, because it starred Ringo Starr as Atouk!

Atouk is a caveman who is bullied by tribe leader Tonda (John Matuszak, Sloth from The Goonies), who has the hottest of all mates, Lana (Barbara Bach, The Spy Who Loved Me, Black Belly of the Tarantula, Short Night of Glass Dolls, Street Law, Island of the Fishmen, man, I’ve seen so many movies with Barbara Bach). He and his friend Lar (Dennis Quaid) get kicked out of the tribe, where they battle a T. Rex, meet Tala (Shelley Long) and also are nearly killed by an abominable snowman (Richard Moll).

Speaking of dinosaurs, they were all created by Jim Danforth, who left the film when the Directors Guild of America wouldn’t give him a co-director credit. You can also see his work in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Clash of the Titans, They Live, The Wizard of Speed and Time, Ninja 3: The Domination, Commando and so many more movies, most often as a matte painter.

When the movie starts it says that it was set on One Zillion B.C. – October 9th. That would be John Lennon’s birthday.

At the end of the movie, Atouk ends up with Tala instead of Lana. But in real life, Starr would marry Bach and they’ve been together since then.

I saw Caveman as a nine year old kid obsessed with dinosaurs at the Spotlight 88. I’m not sure what movie I saw it with. It could have been a reissue of Bob Crane’s Superdad but I’d like to think that I saw it with Super Fuzz.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) is just out of prison — yeah, he’s an ex-con ex-cop who killed a gangster instead of sending him behind bars — and back at his former hangout in Rain City, Wanda’s Cafe, which is run by his ex-lover, who is named Wanda (Geneviève Bujold) as you can guess. Meanwhile, Coop (Keith Carradine) is new in town and working for a gangster named Solo (Joe Morton) and dragging along his wife Georgia (Lori Singer) and boy Spike. While her husband is out doing crime, she works for Wanda and that’s where Hawk decides to protect her, which she’ll need when her husband screws up and runs into trouble in the form of mobster Hilly Blue (Divine), who is always followed by a violinist, as well as another brutal killer named Nate Nathanson (John Considine, who was Doctor Death).

Director and writer Alan Rudolph made a wild movie, one that feels like the future trapped in the past, a place where every character has their own strange fashion developed by the actor’s themselves, sets designed by local Seattle artists and a soundtrack performed by Marianne Faithfull. It’s not a movie discussed much but seems to take place within the world of movies instead of where we come from. I’d compare it to a non-musical Streets of Fire, which is interesting, seeing as how it stars a rock star.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

I always wondered why the 1991 John Leslie adult movie Curse of the Catwoman had such a cinematic opening — yes, it’s true, even in the video era of dirty movies, they could often look like real movies and had plots and were actually worth watching — and then, when I saw the beginning of The Hunger, it all came together. It’s totally taking shots from this and the plot kind of from Cat People.

But I digress and hadn’t even started.

Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) has been alive since, well, the beginning of time it seems, always taking in human lovers and making them eternal like her. Like John (David Bowie). He’s been with her for at least two hundred years and now, they pose as a rich New York City couple who teach classical music.

But the curse of eternal life is not eternal youth. He’s aging years in days and seeks out Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who along with her boyfriend Tom (Cliff De Young) and Charlie (Rufus Collins) are studying how to reverse the impact of the years on the human body. But even feeding on Alice Cavender, the girl who Miriam was planning to be her next lover, won’t keep him alive. He begs her to kill him but there’s no way to do that. Instead, like all her past inamorato and inamorata, he lies moaning for eternity in a coffin in the attic, stuck between the land of the living and the dead.

As Sarah comes to the apartment to find John, she instead encounters Miriam and the two become obsessed with one another, changing how Sarah relates to the world as Miriam pursues her, with her blood overtaking the humanity that runs through Sarah’s body.

Any movie that starts with Bauhaus playing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” before Bowie and Deneuve consume John Stephen Hill and Ann Magnuson isn’t just going to be forgotten. It’s going to be the kind of film that inspires entire subcultures.

On the commentary for The Hunger, Sarandon shares that she hates the ending: “The thing that made the film interesting to me was this question of, “Would you want to live forever if you were an addict?” But as the film progressed, the powers that be rewrote the ending and decided that I wouldn’t die, so what was the point? All the rules that we’d spent the entire film delineating, that Miriam lived forever and was indestructible, and all the people that she transformed died, and that I killed myself rather than be an addict. Suddenly I was kind of living, she was kind of half dying… Nobody knew what was going on, and I thought that was a shame.”

Tony Scott knows how to shoot a movie. I just think it’s funny that the lesbian sex in this movie scandalized people when Eurohorror directors had been making sapphic bloodsucker movies for years, like Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (and about five or more other Jess vampire films), the many vampires of Jean Rollin, Jose Larraz’s Vampyres) and Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness. Or, even closer to home, The Velvet Vampire.

When this failed at the box office, Scott quit directing and went back to commercials. He would come back to make Top Gun and after that, he kept making films.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

At one point, in the midst of the comic book boom of the early 90s, Malibu Comics — owned by Dave Olbrich and Tom Mason with the private financing of Scott Mitchell Rosenberg — was big enough to encompass Eternity Comics, Aircel, Adventure and from 1992 to 1993, Image Comics.

That’s right. Despite the small origins of starting with Ex-Mutants, Maliby eventually was published licensed comics for Planet of the Apes and Alien Nation, as well as being the publisher in record of books like Youngblood and Spawn, becoming 10% of the entire comic book industry and for a time, they were bigger than D.C.

Their own characters like the aforementioned Ex-Mutants and Dinosaurs for Hire got video games and the company was doing well when Image got big enough to publish its own books. This led to Malibu’s Ultraverse, which looked quite different than other comics on the racks, as Malibu premiered digital coloring and higher quality paper.

The continuity of the Ultraverse was, well, ultra tight and packed with crossovers. There was also plenty of talent on the first books. Prime has Bob Jacob, Gerard Jones, Len Strazewski, Norm Breyfogle and Bret Blevins. Hardcase was created by James D. Hudnall. And the last of the initial three books, The Strangers, was by Steve Englehart and Rick Hoberg. Other major creators would come on board like Mike W. Barr, Steve Gerber and James Robinson.

There was a thirteen-episode Ultraforce cartoon — and toyline! — and a Glen A. Larson-created Nightman series that came out of the imprint before Marvel Comics bought the company in November 1994 supposedly so they could purchase their in-house coloring studio or maybe to keep D.C. from buying them. The Ultraverse became Earth-93060 and gradually was whittled down to fewer and fewer titles until the line ended by the end of 1997.

In 2003, Steve Englehart was commissioned by Marvel to relaunch the Ultraverse, but it never happened. There’s a rumor that the way profit sharing was part of the company — or allegedly the. shady business dealings of Rosenberg — will keep these characters in limbo.

But I told you that to tell you this.

At one point — 1993 — Malibu introduced their new hero Firearm by making a 35-minute VHS that came with an issue of the comic.

Created by writer James Robinson and artists Howard Chaykin and Cully Hamner, Firearm lasted nineteen issues and told the story of private detective Alec Swan, who keeps getting pulled into ultra-human work.

Directed by Darren Doane — who also made Blink 182’s “Dammit” and oh Lord, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas — and written by Robinson, this introduces you to Alec Swan (James Jude Courtney, yes, the man who would one day by The Shape), a British SBS commando who became a member of the secretive Lodge, a group of secret agents who operate outside of the rules of governments. He’s called Firearm because, well, he can kill anyone and just about anything thanks to his gun shooting abilities. He’s also obsessed with film noir, hence relocating to Los Angeles and trying to be an old-fashioned detective.

The movie introduces his antagonist Duet (Joe Hulser) and is a basic 80s tough cop action film, but man, it has tons of squibs in it. It leads directly into issue zero of the comic, which it was packed with for $14.95.

Robinson went on to write one of the best comics of, well, ever in Starman and a comic book movie that is the inverse in quality of the comic that inspired it, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

As for this movie, well, it’s certainly interesting that it even exists.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

The Green Hornet started as a radio show on January 31, 1936 on WXYZ, the same Detroit station that aired Challenge of the Yukon and The Lone Ranger, a show that this is connected to, as The Green Hornet is newspaperman Britt Reid, the son of Dan Reid Jr., who is the nephew of the Lone Ranger.

It was so successful that starting on April 12, 1938, it was syndicated by the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network, and then NBC Blue and its successors, the Blue Network and ABC. The show ran the whole way until September 8, 1950 and then came back for a short run from September 10 to December 5, 1952.

Created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, with input from radio director James Jewell, The Green Hornet was so popular that he got this thirteen-episode serial, which was followed by a fifteen-episode sequel, The Green Hornet Strikes Again!

Britt Reid (Gordon Jones with Al Hodge as the voice of the Green Hornet; he also did the voice on the radio) is the publisher of The Sentinel newspaper by day and The Green Hornet by night, along with his Korean valet — and also the inventor of his Black Beauty car and gas gun — Kato. For this serial, Kato would be no longer Japanese, due to World War II, and is instead a Korean man that Britt saved from the Japanese. He’s played by Keye Luke, who was Charlie Chan’s number one son and in everything from Kung Fu to Gremlins.

Directed by Ford Beebe (The Invisible Man Returns, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) and Ray Taylor (Outlaw Country, Frontier Revenge) and written by George H. Plympton (Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom), Basil Dickey (The Crimson Ghost) and Morrison Wood, this serial finds the Green Hornet and Kato stopping faulty bridge and tunnel construction, insurance fraud, bus and truck sabotage, dry cleaning and zoo extortion, election fraud, gun running and the attempted bombing of the offices of The Sentinel, all commanded by the evil mastermind known as The Chief.

It’s really interesting to see this character before the TV show that most discovered him from, but I’ve always loved the radio show and this even gets the buzzing noise and theme song right.

The Green Hornet is available from VCI on blu ray. It comes with liner notes by author Martin Grams Jr., two radio episodes of the show, an audio piece by Clifford Weimer and a photo gallery. You can get it from MVD.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

OK, I’m cheating. This is a comic strip not a comic book, but Dondi was created by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen and at the height of its fame, it ran in more than a hundred newspapers from September 25, 1955, to June 8, 1986. When I was obsessed by the comic pages in the Sunday paper — and, as always, the movie section with huge drive-in listings — Dondi was one of the strips I hated. I had no interest and I always wondered who did.

Dondi started as a five-year-old World War II orphan from Italy who didn’t know his name or family who was brought to America by soldiers Ted Wills and Whitey McGowan. By the early 1960s, he was a Korean War orphan and by the 70s, he was a Vietnamese kid. If there’s a tragedy or a war, Dondi is like Tom Joad and he will be there.

In 1961, Dondi was such a big thing that there was this movie, which stars David Kory in the title role and David Janssen as Dealey. Amazingly, Whitey died in the comic, so for some reason, they avoided all of that. Patti Page plays Liz and the creators of the comic show up, with Edson as a cop and Hansen as a sketch artist.

I was obsessed by the Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time as a kid. As an adult, I realize that so many of the movies they made fun of — Robot Monster, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia — are really good.*

Dondi is not one of those movies.

Director and producer Albert Zugsmith** said that Allied Artists made the film to prove that they could make movies for kids and then “arbitrarily cut the wrong twenty minutes out of it.”

How bad is it? Arnold Stang, who is in some horrible movies — Skidoo, Hercules In New York — is not the worst thing in it. The whole soundtrack is on one instrument, the most annoying of all musical implements, the harmonica. And David Kory was just seven years old and can’t be blamed for how bad he is in this movie. He’s like…there’s never been a bad this bad. He was the son of Diane Kory, who was once a Rockette and was supposedly spotted on a New York City sidewalk because yes, he looks a lot like Dondi. I guess, knowing how much I hated the daily adventures of this kid, I should hate his movie just as much, so mission accomplished.

*Come back on April 20 for more of me against the Medveds.

**Zugsmith also produced Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, Captive Women and Touch of Evil and directed one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen, The Chinese Room. He also made Mamie Van Doren a star with High School Confidential!, The Beat Generation, The Big Operator, Girls Town and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, so I can forgive him this movie.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

Rem Lazar is not a comic book but man, he’s a hero and one that has obsessed me since I first saw him as part of the Found Footage Festival.

Director and writer Scott Zakarin may have gone on to create one of the first web series called The Spot, but I always thought that Rem Lazar was either a Christian kid video or something from one of those alien planets that was sent to our world and would always seem like we would never understand it. You know, like it was from Canada.

Ashley (Courtney Kernaghan) and Zack (Jonathan Goch) have the same imaginary friend, superhero Rem Lazar and they paint a mannequin to look just like him. And by just look like him, it looks like the deranged dreams of children left alone for too long.

Those fantasies come true and Rem Lazar (Jack Mulcahy, who was Frank in the first two Porky’s movies) comes to magical life — no hat like Frosty needed — and he’ll go away in a day unless they find his Quixotic Medallion. This will involve battling the frightening CGI video effect known as Vorock, who is played by Zakarin. Yet all they must do to best him is tell him how much they love him. Also: they must sing. Sing a lot.

This was also part of a list of movies that the essential Scarecrow Video was attempting to keep alive after the death of VHS. Nick Prueher of the Found Footage Festival said, “We first saw Creating Rem Lezar on VHS in a stranger’s living room in Denver at about 3 in the morning — ideal viewing conditions for this wonderfully strange artifact from the 80s. We thought it was religious at first — either that or Canadian — because something just seemed off. But it turns out it’s neither! It’s just a wholly original kids movie with catchy songs that are still in our heads years later.”

Now the Found Footage guys are part of re-releasing this movie in high definition for its 35th anniversary. It also has a 30-minute documentary on the making of this oddity with interviews from Mulcahy, Zakarin and composer Mark Mulé. It’s exclusively available on the Found Footage Festival web store.

If I am left to my own devices for long enough, I end up singing songs from this movie. After all, “When I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of a dream.” You can’t argue with that kind of thinking.