Roger Corman originally made this movie about a scientist, but that was “too obvious” so he changed the lead to be “a jazz musician who had taken too much drugs, and I get into about four or five pages, and I thought, “You know, I don’t like this idea”, and so I threw the whole thing out, and started back and went back with the scientist, which was the original idea.”

Shot in three weeks on a budget of approximately $300,000 — that seems luxurious for Corman — and played a double feature with Dementia 13.

It stars Ray Milland as Dr. James Xavier, who is trying to increase the range of human vision, allowing hums to see the ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths and even beyond. Being a somewhat mad scientist, he tests the eyedrops on himself and soon can do more than just see through clothes, he can see shapes, colors and forms even when his eyes are closed, as his eyelids can’t stop the visions.

After a friend is killed by accident, he heads for Vegas, where he wins money at casinos and becomes part of a sideshow. The problem is that by this point, his eyes are entirely black and he can’t shut off the visions that allow him to see into the heart of the universe.

Finally, a revival church tells him that if his eyes offend him, he should pluck them out. So he does! What an ending!

I’m spoiling that to tell you how awesome Roger Corman is.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King claimed that there was an unshot ending with Milland screaming “I can still see” after gouging out his eyes. Corman replied by saying, “Now it’s interesting. Stephen King saw the picture and wrote a different ending, and I thought, “His ending is better than mine.””

With great small roles for Don Rickles and Dick Miller, this movie moves so fast and gets so much in that it’s nearly perfect. The effects may be dated, but who cares? They work. The whole movie just works.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Clinton Rawls is an instructor at the Lamar Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on the humanities, art history, and film appreciation. As a labor of love, he translates foreign language and unofficial James Bond comics into English for the first time on his website, Comics Royale. Drop him a line and enjoy more 007 adventures!

Note: You can see also read’s Sam’s take which was posted on September 6, 2021.

The tagline of this movie, “Stealing stones and breaking bones,” should tell you all you need to know, as this is the Indian Hindi-language remake of Snatch and yes, such a thing is possible.

Director Firoz Nadiadwala some very loose remakes of other movies like Phir Hera Pheri being based on another Guy Ritchie movie Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Welcome Loosely inspired by Mickey Blue Eyes, Awara Paagal Deewana ripping off The Whole Nine Yards and Deewane Huge Paagal remixing There’s Something About Mary.

Career criminal Raja (Shahid Kapoor), his lover Tina (Ayesha Takia) and her uncle Choubey (Paresh Rawal) are jewel thieves when Raja isn’t also living the life of Rahul, who had been killed in an accident. However, a gangster named Moscow Chikna (Arbaaz Khan) wants to chop off Choubey’s arms. So they abduct Rocky (Chunkey Pandey), who has stolen an even bigger diamond, only to earn the wrath of his uncle Choski (Gulshan Grover), who hires Gunmaster G9 (Jackie Shroff) to cut their throats if they don’t give him back his nephew.

At some point, everyone dresses like Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Wonder Woman, which is where the poster comes from, and then Mike Tyson shows up in the credits like this is one of the Hangover movies. Huh?

This did horribly with critics and audiences. That said, it’s worth a curiosity look on Tubi.

Baytekin Fezada Carpinsanlar (Flash Gordon’s Battle In Space) aired on Turkish MTV at some point and that has allowed viewers worldwide to see a much better print of this movie than anyone would imagine possible.

I remember when the Buster Crabbe serial would air late at night in the year before and after the big-budget Flash Gordon movie and my grandfather laughing at how amazing these films looked when he was young and how silly they appeared today. I didn’t agree, as I was just astounded by the world that they gave me.

This movie plays way fast and loose with Flash, who learns early that he’s one of the princes of the galaxy who has been brainwashed to forget his lineage by Ming.

Amazingly, Flash became a big deal in Turkey and his adventures were altered by Mehmet Gurtunga, who published two other Alex Raymond strips — Secret Agent X-9 and Jungle Jim — as all the adventures of Baytekin, but localized in Turkey. Even odder is that this is a Xerox of a Xerox, as Jungle Jim was created to tackle Tarzan, while Flash Gordon was the counterpart to Buck Rogers.

And then — man, I’m just loving Ed Glaser’s How the World Remade Hollywood and you will too when you buy it — Turkey remixed the Buck Rogers serial and the movies Jungle Jim and Nabonga, all of which starred Flash Gordon actor Crabbe — and made them Bayterkin films.

I should add here that Crabbe would play Brigadier Gordon in an episode of Buck Rogers which really brings this all together.

In this, there’s no Zarkov, but plenty of women for Flash to fall in love with. He does not, however, send the Dale Arden character the mental message “Oh my God, this girl’s really turning me on.”

In a perfect world, the 1980 movie would have been a huge success and we would have received numerous Italian remakes of it.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

In the pages of Ed Glaser’s How the World Remade Hollywood, I learned that Evil Dead was such a huge movie in India that numerous films took its artwork and tree attack as their own, with 2007’s Bhayam (The Fear) going so far as to outright take footage in an Indian-infused bit of Bruno Mattei-esque thievery.

Bach ke Zara (Tread Carefully) may not take footage, but it’s literally the same story as Sam Raimi’s film, with director Salim Raza going all out to deliver zombie and possession action on a budget somewhat even lower than Raimi had back in 1981.

Where his film differs is that we see how the archaeologist who found the Necronomicon was dispatched — only hinted in the first two Evil Dead movies — as well as filling the movie with no small amount of crowd-pleasing sex scenes.

There’s also a music video within the movie that has nothing at all to do with the actual movie and for that, I must compliment the filmmakers. It looks exactly like something Christina Aguilera would make, what with the muscle men and mud dancing.

So yes, when Sunny, Raja, Sweety, Nicole and Sheena were warned away from this house on the lake, they should have listened. But one look at the Book of the Dead they found and you’ll think it’s more cute than sinister and you’d probably read its pages too.

Also, there’s less of a tree assault and more tree-hugging, but the reverse way that you expect it. And hey, most of their countrymen don’t do burial, so the characters in this movie were made Christian. That’s the kind of explaining that movies try to do to make sense of Van Damme speaking in his accent, you know?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Five humanoid turtles from the planet Battlestar and Princess Yesular have crash landed on Earth after a battle with the dreaded Shark Gang, who are all rats, but it’s a cool name. So yes, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remix asks us to imagine an alternate universe where Master Splinter is the bad guy, that there are five turtles that can transform into human beings and that Go-Bots is in the same time and space as our heroes in the halfshell.

This was not the first time that Shin Hyun-hwan had teamed with Popeye Science, a toy company in South Korea, to make a movie directly based on toys. Of course, none of the toys he made movies about were unique. According to How the World Remade Hollywood, he started by reverse engineering Japanese mech toys to look close to other films that were coming out, including Space Gundam V, which has nothing to do with Gundam and instead a remix of Space Dimension Fortress Macross.

This time, the turtles are using a Bandai Machine Robo design while the Sharks have Galactic Gale Baxingar as their weapon. You have to love that level of sheer bul-al, right?

Also, this movie does not care at all about giving kids nightmares, as the moment the Sharks hit Earth, they go to the woods and outright murder some children.

Not only does this movie jump between live action and traditional animation, it has a robot to shoots lasers out of its pelvic area, which is also a good power to have.

Imagine how strange it would be to grow up with Our Friend Power 5 and then learn that it’s all a lie. Kind of like how we played with Transformers without realizing that they were multiple lines of mechs all remixed for Western sensibilities. Kind of like Robotech, which took the aforementioned Macross and mixed that show with Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, two entirely unrelated shows, to make a new narrative for U.S. audiences. Or how Voltron combined Beast King GoLion and Armoured Fleet Dairugger XV to create one Americanized cartoon continuity. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

What does Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai mean?

Rain the Color of Blue with A Little Red In It.

And even though Prince asked us to “reach out for something new,” this movie — based on the life of famous musician Mdou Moctar — is also a homage to Prince’s first movie. But yet it emerges as a truly unique piece of cinema all its own.

The amazing book How the World Remade Hollywood explains how the music of Sub-Saharan Africa moved from one phone at a time via MP3 and bluetooth, including the fusion of traditional Tuareg guitar music with modern amplification. In Niger, where this movie was made, this so-called desert blues found a home.

Christopher Kirkley, who traveled this region to discover its music found parallels between Moctar and Prince. This allowed him to imagine a Purple Rain that retains the family struggles while also understanding that the audience was mostly Muslim, so Prince’s sexuality would be toned down.

Made with no trained actors, this film is truly all about the music. Moctar started playing on a guitar he built out of wood and bicycle cables. If music is truly universal — I believe that it is — the sheer fact that this film can transplant Minnesota to Agadez should make you realize that we aren’t all that different.

After all, Prince also sang:

“Make believe U’re a hero, make believe U’re a star
Make believe that U’re somebody instead of who U really are
Make believe
It’s only a movie.”

I don’t like the Razzies much, but I have to agree with them for once. Ghosts Can’t Do It won worst picture, worst director, worst actress and worst supporting actor for the artist who debuted here, Donald Trump. Trump and co-star Leo Damian were also nominated for worst new star, but that went to Sofia Coppola. In retrospect, that seems rather mean. Actually, it seems a lot mean because I’ve watched untold movies some would consider bad and this movie is without a doubt the very worst film I’ve ever seen.

Somehow, John Derek decided to make a movie worse than Bolero and Tarzan the Ape Man and I didn’t think he had it in him. But oh wow — he did.

Katie (Derek) and Scott (Anthony Quinn) are thirty years apart in age but have a fulfilling, sex-filled relationship. Unfortunately, he has a heart attack and learns that they can never horizontally dance again, so instead of looking into alternate therapy or a second opinion, he kills himself.

Julie Newmar plays his guardian angel, who is so bad at her job that she allows him to return to Eartha and come up with a plan where Katie will kill Fausto (Damian) and he’ll possess the body. This comes after she’s traveled the world and tried to find the perfect sex partner, all while running her husband’s business and wheeling and dealing against Trump, who plays himself.

The end of this? Fausto accidentally drowns and Scott is unable to possess Fausto’s dead body, yet when Katie revives him with CPR, Scott can possess him. Huh? I just watched this movie only to watch it change the rules in the end after hours of Anthony Quinn violently pissing all over his acting legacy in a performance that defines and goes beyond bad.

I mean, let’s look at the dialogue in this and imagine it in Trump’s bombastic tone and Bo’s stilted voice:

Donald Trump: Be assured, Mrs. Scott, that in this room there are knives sharp enough to cut you to the bone and hearts cold enough to eat yours as hors-d’oeuvres.

Katie O’Dare Scott: You’re too pretty to be bad!

Donald Trump: You noticed.

Also, if Katie’s last name is Scott, her dead husband’s name is Scott Scott?

The credits for this have this line: And Yes, That Really Was Donald Trump.

Are we to doubt that that is the man himself? Is it an android?

Also, one more time, this movie’s happy ending is an innocent man dying so that Bo Derek can keep on banging a man thirty years older than her who has spent most of the movie in a tube lit like a swimming pool bellowing dialogue while she refers to him as “Great man.”

You can watch this on Tubi.