I love that the cover of this movie looks like it could very well be a kid movie about unicorns and the actual film is full of gore, cannibalism and that trait that Heavy Metal and The Hitchhiker always had where breasts just have to appear every few scenes.

A widow (Karin Brauns) goes on a dangerous quest to meet a mythical wish-granting unicorn which just so happens to live in a Wishing Forest. And that’s where the cannibals live and a feral goddess (Stormi Maya) who devours the hearts of non-believers.

This movie is like a Nightwish tour shirt come to life for 80 someodd minutes. And the effects are way better than they need to be, the gross moments are more than gross and the women are all universally the kind of gorgeous that red blooded boys enjoy. It made me wish that the 80s era of deathstalkers and sorceresses never ended and we got more of these movies.

Directed by Leia and Jadzia Perez from a script by Jamie Grefe, who has also write some new Emanuelle movies that aren’t out yet, this movie feels like getting dosed outside an Amon Amarth show, making out with someone you don’t know and will never see again, then coming to at a Melvins show across town in the midst of drinking your third beer. It doesn’t have to make any sense for you to enjoy it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Katt Shea was in My Tutor, Preppies, Hollywood Hot Tubs and Barbarian Queen before working with Andy Ruben to make The Patriot for Roger Corman. She’d go on to direct several films and even earn a four-day retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where Poison Ivy debuted. You can check out her movies Dance of the Damned, Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls, Streets, Last Exit to Earth, The Rage: Carrie 2, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and Rescued by Ruby.

While working undercover, Cody (Kay Lenz) and her partner Sergeant Heineman (Greg Evigan) are too late to save Angel (Michelle Foreman), a dancer who has been thrown off a bridge and set on fire. Of course, this means that Cody must become Sunny, dancing at the Rock Bottom for its owner Ray (Norman Fell).

As she gains the trust of the dancers, they’re all being killed one by one. Cody keeps dancing at the club, defying the orders of her superiors, sure she can catch the killer. Is it Pocket, the one handed creep? Is it Angel’s lover Roxanne (Pia Kamakahi)? And how does Roxanne’s brother Eric fit in?

In a New York Times article, Shea explained how she was inspired by a trip to a strip club: “I didn’t want to go because I felt it was humiliating to women. But I finally got myself there. I sat down and began watching these acts and they’re performing as if they really cared.”

So — spoiler: Roxanne is dead. Eric is Roxanne, taking over her life as he was sure Angel would take his sister away. You can imagine that this is incredibly problematic, as they say, but it’s also a Roger Corman movie. In fact, Corman was convinced that only a woman could be a convincing woman on stage. Shea surprised him and showed him up by fooling him. She would later explain: “He [Corman] turned every shade. He was purple by the end.”

Also, as this is a Corman movie, all the songs that are danced to in this film were added in post-production. They had been filmed with popular songs, but those songs had to be replaced in post, because clearing licensing would be too expensive.

Shea worked with real exotic dancers, teaching them to act. Debra Lamb was one of them and she has been in plenty of movies since this, including Deathrow Gameshow, All Strippers Must Die! and Point Break, often displaying her fire-eating skills. Shea works as an acting teacher to this day, with students including Christina Applegate, Alison Lohman, Sophia Lillis and Drew Barrymore.

She also claims that this was the first movie to show pole dancing.

It would not be the last.

Outside a small God-fearing American town, a cult of demon worshiping gender queer killers awaits their own savior, the one that will return to our planet and crush the Gender Binary underneathe its cloven hoof.

Pretty much everything people worry that trans people will do when they enter a bathroom, Trannysnatchers! seizes the SOV ethos of the 80s and makes a messy, gooey and ridiculous in the best way horror film.

Made over two summers in Portland, Oregon, this was directed by Caedmonster (who also played Hella and worked an assistant camera person, boom operator, sound editor, choreographer, production coordinator, writer, editor, producer, production designer, art director, script supervisor and set decortator), Nicholas Boxwell (also story, cinematographer, writer, digital effects, editor, associate producer, production manager and sound mixer) and James Gottleber (best boy, camera, story, editor, executive producer, production designer and set decorator).

According to the Kickstarter page for the movie, Caedmonster said, “Being that we are improvisational artists, this film is not constructed in the traditional sense. Working with a detailed outline, rather than a script, all the performances are improvised.

This film is a labour of love for us. It’s a very unique opportunity to create something that is thru and thru a collaboration between people who genuinely love one another. Each cast member has developed their own character, and the story was written by all of us over a series of meetings.

Transgendered people are marginalized so much in our society, which is why we are making a film that gives a voice to this group of people. Many of us on the crew are genderqueer, and we hope to offer up a piece of work that can shine a light on this issue. This film is our torch song.”

I had a blast watching it, as it really pushed as hard as you can push. Here’s hoping that this gets some kind of release someday outside of just YouTube, because I had a blast watching it.

Screenwriters Edward Hume and Lewis John Carlino both had some really incredible careers. Hume wrote the pilot episodes for Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco and Barnaby Jones, as well as The Day After while Carlino wrote Seconds, The Mechanic, Crazy Joe and Where Have All the People Gone? amongst other movies. Here, they adapt the Stanton Forbes novel Go To Thy Deathbed for director William A. Fraker, who usually worked as a cinematographer on movies like Games, Exorcist II: The Heretic and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He wouldn’t direct another movie after this until The Legend of the Lone Ranger.

Inside a mansion lives the fifteen-year-old Marguerite (Sondra Locke), her mother Katherine (Mary Ure) and her grandmother Julia (Signe Hasso). Our heroine takes daily injections of something with no label, all while discussing her paranoia with her dolls, collecting amoebas and painting disturbing images. Now, her father Michael (Robert Shaw) wants to reconnect with her after nearly ten years, as he’s about to divorce her mother to marry Anne (Sally Kellerman).

Soon, her mother and grandmother are dead at the hands of one of her dolls, Aaron, and Anne is growing concerned by just how physical the relationship between father and daughter becomes. Even when they attempt to make love, the camera finds Marguerite joining in from another room, alone, in synch with her father.

There’s no way that this is going to end well for anyone, obviously, but the twist at the end? Oh yes, no one will see that coming. Also, Locke is 27 playing 15, a woman trapped in a child’s body, so perhaps the twist is one you will imagine.

This movie stayed hidden for some time, as actual filming completed in the early part of 1971, but its premiere was not until late 1972 and it wasn’t released until the winter of 1973. I wonder just how much the film’s subject matter had to do with that.

Prior to becoming an actor, Nicole Maines was the anonymous plaintiff in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court case Doe v. Regional School Unit 26. She argued her school district could not deny her access to the female bathroom for being transgender, with the court deciding that barring transgender students from school bathrooms consistent with their gender identity is unlawful. It was a landmark decision, in fact, the first by a state court.

She and her twin brother Jonas have also been the subject of several articles in regards to how one identical twin can be transgender and one can be cisgender. She also played Nia Nal, a distant relative of Legion of Superheroes member Dream Girl on Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow.

In Bit, she plays Laurel, an eighteen-year-old with a troubled past who has moved past it and is off to the big city to live with her brother Mark (James Paxton, son of Bill). On her very first night out, she meets music video director Izzy (Zolee Griggs) and a pack of bloodsuckers made up of Frog (Char Diaz) and Roya (Friday Chamberlain), led by Duke (Diana Hopper).

While this movie has queer and trans characters, it never shoves them in your face. Instead, it presents them as they are, you accept them and you simply enjoy the unique and fun spin that this puts on vampires, in particular the fact that all male vampires are destined to be cruel. If Vlad, the man who turned Duke is any indication, you can see why the female vampires at the beating heart of this movie work so hard to destroy predatory men.

Director and writer Brad Michael Elmore — who also worked with Paxton, MC Gainey and Greg Hill when making Boogeyman Pop and also directed The Wolfman’s Hammer — was able to surprise me by the choices that his characters make throughout the film. The entire section of the film with Duke’s origin is so well-staged and shot by Cristina Dunlap that it takes a moment that could have just been spoken by the actress and gives it bloody and brilliant life.

And I absolutely loved the music of Wolfmen Of Mars!

So how about that sequel that got teased?

There are 24 movies in the Canadian series Tales for All and man, are they all this weird? Originally known as Michael’s Fright, this is a movie that Skippy paid to be in, which is wild, because dude, Canadian kids movies are more frightening than American horror.

Michael Baskin is an 11-year-old boy in a crisis. His mother is in Australia taking care of her father’s estate and I’d like to think that she’s in Next of Kin. His father is barely able to take care of Michael and his sister Susan, who has taken to wearing her mother’s robe and role, which seems pretty much like the kind of behavior that CPS would question.

When Michael learns that an abandoned house has burned down — I’d like to think it’s the house from Cathy’s Curse — he explores it and encounters the ghosts of homeless people who died in the fire, which is the plot of, again, a horror movie anywhere else but Canada, where it’s a plot point in a movie — and I can’t stress this enough — made expressly for kids. The ghosts give him “The Fright” and he loses all his hair. Those same ghosts feel bad and give him the cure of the title, which he takes too far against their advice and starts growing way too much hair.

To hammer home that this is not for kids, his friend Connie uses the peanut butter solution all over his pre-pubes to show his friends that he’s gone through juvenescence, except that he grows Sunset Strip hair metal pubic hair.

Then, a teacher named The Signor knocks out and drugs Michael and kidnaps 500 children to make paintbrushes out of his ever-growing hair. Is that enough? What about Celine Dion singing two songs?

Producer Rock Demers has said when he and director Michael Rubbo began the film, their goal was to create a “gentle, frightening film.” He felt the theme was “If something frightens you, find out why. In most cases you’ll discover it wasn’t so frightening after all.”

Did he see the movie that he made? This was a bedtime story that Rubbo used to tell his children! And as this was Rubbo’s first non-documentary film, Czech surreal director Vojtech Jasný mentored him, so maybe that explains something.

You can get this from Severin Kids.

If you were a kid that grew up in Ellwood City, you were looking to rent one of three movies that were the hottest of childhood commodities: Rad, Thrashin’ and The Dirt Bike Kid.

Who doesn’t want to watch Peter Billingsley go one on one with Stuart Pankin over a magical dirt bike? Having this movie for the night was a near mythic power trip and I still wonder, why didn’t the video store get another copy? Did they not care about the children?

Billingsley — wearing the exact same pair of glasses that he wore as Ralphie in A Christmas Story — is Jack Simmons, Pankin is the town’s banker Mr. Hodgkins and Jack’s mom Janet is played by Anne Bloom, making this a Not Necessarily the News reunion for her, Pankin,  Danny Breen (who plays Flaherty) and director Hoite C. Caston, who also made thirty-two episodes of that HBO comedy series. But isn’t the real star the 1985 Yamaha YZ80 that Jack buys for $50 that is filled with occult energy?

The idea for this came from Julie Corman and she has the same carny instincts as her husband, knowing that young kids would need something to rent along with their parents and older brothers and sisters. She made this for $800,000 and it moved 100,000 tapes, back in the day when rental copies cost ninety bucks. Never doubt a Corman when it comes to making money.

Mordecai Richler, the author who wrote the book that this Canadian kid movie is based on, sounds like the kind of name someone would get when they go to WWE or a robber baron or both.

Speaking of pro wrestling, the bad guy in this, the Hooded Fang, was once a grappler but now he runs a prison for children. Children that he hates.

Look, Canada doesn’t care if you’re a child, they’re going to destroy your brain with their demented movies.

Our hero, Jacob Two-Two, is “two plus two plus two years old, has two brothers and two sisters, and has to say everything twice just to be heard; odd numbers aren’t his thing.” Jacob doesn’t fit in at home, even adults make fun of the fact that he says things twice and soon he ends up in that aforementioned jail as when you have a lawyer named Mr. Loser, you know what to expect.

So the judge sends our protagonist to the medium house and Emma and Noah.m his siblings, show up as lawyers that strike fear into the judge’s heart. It’s too late to appeal, so they give Jacob a jewel tracking device and if he sees any children hurt in prison, he is to contact them.

Somehow, Master Fish and Mistress Fowl seem similar to the people that watched as Jacob was railroaded in a store, so Canadian kids get to learn that conspiracy is real way early. All the kids in the jail are gray and the Hooded Fang despises them all, because one kid was all it took to defeat his gimmick, taking him from frightening to funny.

Then there’s Mister Fox, who steals the jewel and has the mission to ruin toy stores. How did Canadian kids not live in mortal fear all the time? And Hooded Fang keeps trying to make Jacob afraid of him, even threatening to feed him to sharks, a fate that Emma and Noah believe has already happened.

Look, Alex Karras actually was a wrestler once. Sure, we know him as a Detroit Lion, as Mongo in Blazing Saddles and Ma’am’s husband on Webster (and in real life). But after getting suspended for betting — NFL players were not paid well at all in the early days — and went back to pro wrestling, a sport he tried before playing pro football. To get the most out of his name from football, he was booked into a feud with Dick the Bruiser, who got heat on the angle by going into Karras’ bar, the Lindell AC Bar, started badmouthing Karras and then fought nearly the entire bar, including several cops. This would not be the only time that the Bruiser caused a riot, as he turned an appearance at Madison Square Garden — teaming with the even more volatile Dr. Jerry Graham against Antonino Rocca and Édouard Carpentier — into a riot that injured 300 fans and took sixty cops to stop. It’s one of the reasons why kids under the age of 16 could not attend the Garden wrestling shows until way into the late 70s.

Richler said, “I think it was a very bad job, very very bad job.” It was remade in 1999 with Gary Busey as the Hooded Fang, Mark McKinney from The Kids In the Hall as Mr. Fish, Miranda Richardson as Miss Fowl and Ice-T as the judge. People hated that version way more than the first movie. There was also a 2003-2006 cartoon series.

The 1978 version was directed and written by Theodore J. Flicker, who also made The President’s Analyst and the TV movie Playmates.