Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Bleeding Skull

Director and writer Jason Holt made six movies in four years, appearing in five of them — Desperation Rising, Angel of Passion, The Swindle, Tuesday Never Comes and Wager of Love — before making this, his last film.

Will (Mitchell Scott, who is the drummer of Cut Copy) is an undercover cop who is looking for a serial killer in the bondage underground of Los Angeles. I mean, that’s what they say this is about, but the result is…a journey to say the least.

Will keeps calling Shannon (Deborah Dutch, who was once Deborah Chaplin and starred in Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave and is the Debra Dare who shows up in Vice Academy 4 and 6), who runs a call girl service and keeps sending him new women to check out.

Somewhere in this, there’s a moment when adult star Sunset Thomas is tied to a bed and whipped by a really unattractive man. She’s not the only adult star on hand, as Trinity Loren, Julian St. Jox, Alana and Rebecca Bardoux are in this.

There’s also a role for Anne Gaybis, who is in all kinds of movies you’ve seen, like Massage Parlor Murders!, The Lost Empire, Fairy Tales, Necromancy, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Showgirls, Bachelor Party, Black Shampoo and even the cashier in Friday the 13th Part III.

There’s so much in this that made me go into a druggy state of joy, like one of the girls who keeps dressing like a man, another character who cosplays Charlie Chaplin, so much fog, even more sax and someone who watched some David Lynch and said, “I can do that” but he couldn’t and we’re all the better for it. It also has dialogue like, “Come death dance with me: multiple times over and over and over, breathlessly delivered.

Who runs a prostitution business that kills men because of some past trauma? This movie’s protagonist or antagonist who is the same person. Does that make sense? No, neither does this movie. And also, it has Troma’s intro but I think this was done far from their fecund grip because even as weird and at times horrible as it is, it’s in another universe from their ham fisted catalog.

I wish they made four of these.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Pick a Lance. I know Lance loves baseball, so I feel like this is the right pick. 

There aren’t many baseball horror movies. Here’s the ones I know:

• The Tobe Hooper directed segment “Eyes” in Body Bags
• Blood Games
• The Battery
• Battlefield Baseball
• The Catcher
• Deadball
• Deadly Strike
• The Fan
• Death On the Diamond
• Fear Strikes Out
• Murder At the World Series
• Night Game
• Terror Strikes Out

You can add Billy Club to the list.

Years ago, back when they were on a little league team, Bobby (Marshall Caswell) and his friends Alison (Erin Hammond), Kyle (Nick Sommer) and Danny (Max Williamson) beat their teammate Billy up something fierce when he struck out in the biggest game of their young lives. They followed this by tying him up, putting him in a dunk tank and trying to drown him. The only thing that saved the poor kid was the umpire, who told him to stand up for himself.

Billy then killed two of his teammates and his coach before being put away for several years.

Directed and written by Drew Rosas and Nick Sommer, this has the teammates get back together and an umpire showing up with a bat murder weapon that he or she uses to kill them off, one by one, before constructing a baseball field in a swamp.

This follows the slasher story of a uniting bad event coming back to haunt people, has a cool looking slasher and a decent final girl. Also: the flashback scene has nudity, which seems correct. The gore is decent and it seems like the directors were trying for cool shots several times, even if they come at the expense of storytelling. This feels a little too long but that’s fine when a movie has numerous moments of baseball bat violence and an ending that is set in a batting cage.

Let’s make more baseball killer movies!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Australia

Terry Bourke made both this and Inn of the Damned for the Fright TV show, but there’s no way either could air on TV. He would go on to make Lady Stay Dead.

A girl (Briony Behets) riding a horse stops to take a break. A man (Norman Yemm) unties her steed and it runs away. As she chases after it, he attacks her and locks her in his home as the credits play, giving a brief fast forward of the evil to come.

Another woman (Carla Hoogeveen) finds herself going off the road and trapped in a dead end. The man returns and smashes her windshield with a shovel and chases her, finally forcing her into his home where he appears nude with a bloody skull over his cock. He then pulls a lever and a rain of rats covers her, an act which excites him to the point that he gets off watching her die.

And that’s it! An hour of a chase and a horrifying ending with no punishment for the man. This feels like the Sawyer clan but was made a few years before Tobe Hooper’s film was shot nearly a world away.

No dialogue, no names and a movie that almost didn’t make it into theaters because of censors. This is how Australian exploitation got its start.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: 1960s

Mickey Hargitay had a life. In the first twenty years of his life, he was a part of an acrobatic act with his brothers, a champion speed skater, a soccer player and a resistance fighter during World War II. He made it to America and settled in Cleveland, working as a plumber and carpenter. He married Mary Birge and started a new acrobatic act with her before being inspired by Steve Reeves and going into weight lifting, becoming a pin-up model and then part of Mae West’s crew of hunky muscular men.

Jayne Mansfield saw him perform with West and said to her waiter, “I’ll have a steak and that tall man on the left.” He used his building skills to create a Pink Palace for her, including a heart shaped swimming pool, and they had three kids together, Miklós,Zoltán, and most famously Mariska, who has been on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit forever.

Jayne demanded that Mickey be in her movies and she had enough power to make it happen. After a few films, he was able to appear in Italian movies like Revenge of The Gladiators, Sheriff Won’t Shoot, Three Bullets for Ringo, Black Magic Rites, Delirium and many more.

However, Hargitay said that when he made this, he “wasn’t any more of an accomplished actor than a taxi driver.”

He’s being kind. He’s amazing in this.

First off, I have no idea what American audiences would think of the idea that a horror magazine is shooting photos for a story. Italian audiences would know that Daniel Parks (Alfredo Rizzo) published a fumetti (more accurately fotoromanzi and fumetti neri, as Raoul wears a costume like Kriminal at one point)a photo comic book that often did horror stories. His entire team — writer Rick (Walter Brandi), secretary Edith (Luisa Baratto), photographer Dermott (Ralph Zucker), assistants Perry (Nando Angelini) and Raoul (Albert Gordon), and models Suzy (Barbara Nelli), Annie (Femi Benussi), Nancy (Rita Klein) and Kinojo (Moa Tahi) — is trying to find the perfect castle to shoot a murder scene in.

They find one that appears just like their wildest nightmares and Perry scales his way into it after no one knocks. Why you would just jump into someone’s castle is beyond me, but this an Italian gothic horror movie, after all. They’re soon caught by the striped shirt wearing henchmen of the castle’s owner, Travis Anderson (Hargitay). He demands that they leave until he sees Edith, who in a movie coincidence used to be his fiancee.

Everyone can stay for the night but the dungeons — where the Crimson Executioner killed innumerable people and was put to death inside his own iron maiden — are forbidden. So the first thing the crew does is go down there and start taking pictures. They disturb the seal of the Crimson Executioner and that’s when Anderson loses his mind, puts on a pro wrestling outfit and starts screaming things like, “Mankind is made up of inferior creatures, spiritually and physically deformed, who would have corrupted the harmony of my perfect body.” It’s Hargitay doing the wild gestures with the voice of Anthony La Penna.

Seriously, Hargitay goes for it in this, killing people in magically lunatic ways, like a gigantic spider web with an obviously fake spider that is all rigged up to shoot arrows at anyone that moves the strings, as well as ladling boiling water onto women’s backs and having a poisoned death massive called the Lover of Death. All the while, he is flipping out and cutting promos on everyone who came into his home and ruined the time he has to escape the world, oil up his body, flex in front of mirrors and spend time with all of his identically dressed muscular hunky servants.

Filmed in Psychovision, this was directed by Massimo Pupillo (Terror-Creatures from the Grave, Lady Morgan’s Vengeance) using the name Max Hunter. The script is by Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, who also wrote Lisa and the Devil.

A nascent slasher at the end of the Italian gothic cycle that looks as pop art colorful and has all the lurid BDSM promise of those police black and white magazines that are pervy than any hardcore pornography because they can’t show it all so they decide to go demented, like having spinning knives cut off bras and slowly reveals nipples, all with jazzy music by Gino Peguri and incredible cinematography by Luciano Trasatti.

This was shot at Balsorano Castle, a place that has seen so many scummy movies for how gorgeous it is. I mean, Sister Emanuelle, Lady Frankenstein, The Devil’s Wedding Night, The Lickerish Quartet, Ator: The Blade Master, Crypt of the Vampire, Black Magic Rites, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, Baby Love, Metti lo diavolo tuo ne lo mio inferno, C’è un fantasma nel mio letto, Lady Barbara, 7 Golden Women Against Two 07: Treasure Hunt, Farfallon and Pensiero d’amore.

You can get this from Severin or watch it on Tubi.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Physical Media

Here’s the difference between physical media and watching this on streaming. Streaming will not have a menu that has animated mouths on all the characters so they can sing the theme song.

Kung Fu Rascals was directed by Steve Wang, who also made The Guyver, Drive, Guyver: Dark Hero, Sirens of the Deep and episodes of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight. He also has worked on the FX crews on movies like The Monster Squad, Predator, DeepStar Six, Gremlins 2, Arena, the Underworld films and so many more.

He also wrote this with Troy Fromin and Johnnie Saiko and, as he played a role in the Super 8 trailer that led to this movie, he ended up acting in it as Chow Chow Mein. He and his friends Lao Ze (Troy Fromin) and Reepo (Johnnie Saiko) have to stop Dar Ling The Bamboo Man from destroying their village. Just like a sentai show, Bamboo Man (Ted Smith) sits in a throne room and orders around his underling Raspmutant the Mad Monk (Wyatt Weed). Then, they send out new monsters and ninjas to fight our three heroes. As for the evil sheriff, that is not Primus’ Les Claypool but the man who wrote the music for Guyver: Dark Hero  — thanks Outlaw Vern — and an Imperial Torture Master (Matt Rose). The bad guys are really bad. The good guys are really good. The humor? Really silly.

$43,000 has never been better spent than it was in the making of this movie, one that closes with giant stone monsters fighting on a beach. And hey — those are the frogs from Hell Comes to Frogtown being brought back and who can blame Wang, because they look great.

In a perfect world, there would have been ten of these movies. Have you ever been forced to have a playdate as a kid with some other child whose mom works with your mom and you don’t want to go and then you get there and not only do they have all the action figures you don’t but also understand their file cards and motivations and you end up having a great time? Well, that’s how this movie feels.

Visual Vengeance has just released this film, the first time it’s ever come out on blu ray. It has tons bonus features, including commentaries, rare BTS footage and a brand new feature-length documentary on the making of the film. Here’s what you get:

• Director-supervised SD master from original tape elements
• The Making of Kung Fu Rascals: Brand New Feature Length Documentary
• The Reunion of the Three Rascals
• Commentary with director Steve Wang and actors Johnnie Saiko, Troy Firman and Ted Smith and composer and actor Les Claypool III
• Commentary with Kung Fu Rascals superfans Justin Decloux and Dylan Cheung
• Steve Wang & Les Claypool III meet again
• Chris Gore Interview: Distributing Kung Fu Rascals on VHS
• Behind The Scenes video diaries
• Original Kung Fu Rascals Super 8 short film
• Steve Wang Short Film: Code 9
• Complete Film Threat Video #6 BTS Article
• Stills and behind the scenes galleries
• Visual Vengeance Trailer
• “Stick Your Own” VHS Sticker Set
• Reversible Sleeve Featuring Original VHS Art
• Folded mini-poster
• 2-sided insert with alternate art
• 12 page mini comic book
• Limited Edition Slipcase by The Dude

If you love kung fu, weird cinema, low budget films or just want an incredible physical media release, you can’t go wrong with this. Get it now from MVD or Diabolik DVD!

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Ghosts

This film’s director and writer, Walt Hefner, got out of the Air Force and went right into working at Spokane, Washington’s State Theater. He worked hard and eventually owned his own theaters and in 1972, opened the Starlite Drive-In. According to this article from the Inlander, Hefner showed some pretty great triple features, such as  I Spit on Your Grave, I Dismember Mama and Snuff all in one night in 1976.

In 1991, Hefner sold his drive-in to a theater chain and used the money to make this movie, produced and filmed in Spokane with an all-local crew. Where did this debut? The Newport Cinemas, built over the drive-in that Hefner once owned, four years after it was filmed.

Ralph (Charlie Shores), Amy (Pamela Kingsley), Jeanie (Jennifer Salmi) and Steve Jessup (Jason Jackson) are stuck. He can’t find a job and is angry that he has to live with his father and have his wife make the money. Then Amy learns that their church needs a caretaker, which gives Ralph something to do other than have flashbacks to Vietnam.

Then he hits Dan Marcum (Bill Hutton) with his van.

Marcum just escaped a mental hospital after years of care. He’d killed his family in that same church where the Jessups now live and his spirit won’t leave Dan alone.

So yes, this sounds like it’s inspired by every 80s haunted house movie — The Shining with the axe and caretaker parts — but what Hefner made is so strange that it begs to be seen. Ralph and Amy seem ready to murder one another at any moment, while Jeanie hurt her legs in an accident that her mother forces her to get past and when she finally gets over it and prepares to go on a date, the ghost of Marcum chains her legs and forcibly spreads them apart. This is a clothed scene but feels like such a violation and her trauma is not ignored. It all happens while one of those strange monkey with cymbal toys goes nuts. It’s terrifying.

Steve seems codependent on his dad. At times, they seem like the only two people who care about each other and then Ralph is abusing him. This all ends with Steve trapped in his room as a low budget version of Gozer mauls him and Ralph can’t figure out how to break the glass window into his son’s room. Who has a glass door for their bedroom? And who lit this scene, because the fog and pink light inside that haunted place is great!

Speaking of family issues, three years after this was made, Jennifer Salmi’s father Albert — the actor who appeared in Caddyshack, Superstition and Empire of the Ants — was served with divorce and restraining order from his wife Roberta. Suffering from clinical depression, he went to her house anyway and shot her before killing himself.

This also has the baptism pool being confused for a pool, explorations of the haunted church, burning baby dolls and a date scene at a movie theater that has no dialogue and seems to go on forever while farting synth plays. As I watched this scene, I was amazed that the movie theater workers had no gloves on and were just about bare handing the popcorn. No one cared in 1987, when this was made, about germs.

Amy does. Ralph gets in bed covered with maggots and acts like it’s not a big deal. Rightly, she goes insane screaming at him and he follows that up by having his son get hit by a car, which is bad guy karma. There’s also a scene where someone gets into a tub filled with snakes and so many poems.

Hefner couldn’t get anyone to pick this movie up. He would have in the early 1980s, as no one would care that it seems like the film stock changes and it sometimes appears shot on video. But in 1987? No, sadly. He kept all the VHS copies in the church he bought to film this in, along with his camera equipment and it all went up in flames in 2017.

Before that, he shot a few other movies. Shooting Grunts is his autobiographical story of how was a combat cinematographer in Vietnam and was seriously wounded at the battle of Khe Sanh.

Then, there’s 2008’s Bad Ghost. I can’t find a copy but it seems like a re-edit of The Ghosting, starring most of the same cast: Salmi is Jeanie, Keith Lee Morris is her boyfriend, Hutton is Dan (called Crazy Dan in this) and Edna Caldwell plays Edna, his wife, a character not in the original movie. The one photo on IMDB of Salmi looks a bit older than she was in The Ghosting. I need this movie.

I’m not saying that this is a good movie but if you know the kind of things that obsess me, you know that I loved it and will recommend it to you.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Thanks to The Schlock Pit for so much info that I used in this review.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Michael Ironside

It’s still early fall as I write this and the last thing I want to think about is snow or icy roads and here I am, watching a movie shot in Winnipeg where huge snow piles are all over the place.

Called A Passion for Murder in the UK, this stars Russian actress Joanna Pacula as Vanessa, a government agent who is sleeping with a married politician named Eric Weaver (Arne Olsen).  After they have a fight, he’s killed when she shoves him out a window and she has to go on the run, as she’s left out in the cold by her black ops bosses. The only person that can help her is Ben Shorr (Michael Nouri), a cab driver.

Directed by Neill Fearnley, whose career was mostly in TV, and written by Olsen and John Alan Schwartz — the Conan le Cilaire who wrote as well as the Alan Black who wrote Faces of Death — the main reason I watched this was Michael Ironside, who plays Quinn, Vanessa’s boss who tells her that she’s a loose end that needs to be killed.

Ben, an author who can’t get a break, has to drive her from Detroit to Seattle, all on back roads. Those roads are all in Canada and man, they’re cold. And kind of boring. There is a sex scene in a rest stop, where Nouri bends Pacula over a sink and someone accidentally walks in.

The real star here is Michael Nouri’s fake long hair. It looks like they threw yarn at him and just gave up. You can’t stop looking at it.

I just wanted Ironside to kill everyone.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Unsung Horrors Rule (708 watched on Letterboxd)

The Ramsay Brothers — there are seven, this is by director Tulsi and writer Shyam — made Indian’s first horror TV show, Zee Horror Show, as well as movies including Mahakaal, Bandh Darwaza and Veerana.

Hundreds of years ago, the procession of Raja Harimaan Singh is stranded near the Black Mountain, leaving him concerned that his daughter Princess Rupali has been taken by devil worshipper Samri. He arrives just in time to save her, as he starts to take her soul, turning her eyes white and then red. The Raja orders him to be beheaded, but before he dies, he says, “So long as my head is away from my body, every woman in your line shall die at childbirth; and when my head is rejoined to my body, I will arise and wipe out every living person in your dynasty.”

Thakur Ranvir Singh, the great-great-grandson of the Raja, knows of this curse, as his wife died giving birth to his daughter Suman, who he is angry with, as she dates a non-royal college boy, Sanjay. Her father reveals the curse to them yet they stay together.

They then take a vacation with Anand and his wife Sapna where they find a painting of the evil Samri. Behind this painting is the head of the Satanist, which is soon joined back to his body, bringing him back to murderous life.

Thakur comes to the rescue and he performs an aarti, a prayer with rhythmic waving of a lamp to create a spiritual connection between the worshiper and the divine, to Lord Shiva. Using a trishul, the trident of Shiva, they defeat the monster and burn him alive, which finally allows our hero and heroine to be married. Then again, Samri returned in the movie Samri 3D in 1985. This also stars Anirrudh Agarwal as the demon, a man who basically walked into the Ramsay’s office and they jumped up and down, as they had spent months trying to find the perfect monster.

The music in this was inspired by The Amityville Horror. It’s the same theme used on the Zee Horror Show.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Spain

Only a Coffin is also known as Les Orgies du Dr. Orloff and yes, that’s the title I prefer.

Howard Vernon wasn’t supposed to play Dr. Orloff in this, but once you realize that it has a lot of the same locations as The Awful Dr. Orloff and that, well, everyone just wanted him to be Dr. Orloff again, it makes sense.

He gathers all of his equally horrid relatives to his castle to tell them that he’s dying of cancer. And PS, he’s spent all of the family fortune. That said, he’s insures himself for millions and tells them that only one of them can get it at which point he kills himself.

The family covers it all up just in time for nephew Daniel (José Bastida) to get into bed with his secretary Judith (María Saavedra) and his poor, innocent wife Greta (Danielle Godet) to discover them. His body disappears as well — is this a giallo? — and then Greta thinks that she has found Orloff’s exhumed body before he attacks her.

Only Pablo (Adolfo Arlés), Daniel’s brother, believes her. So when he digs up Orloff, he finds his sibling’s body and…someone else. Someone not Dr. Orloff.

As you expect, Dr. Orloff is using this night to kill everyone he ever wanted to kill. Would we expect anything less? Well, a little, as this is a Santos Alcocer movie (he also made El Coleccionista de cadáveres, which was released in the U.S. as Cauldron of Blood). Which means it’s fine, but if Jess Franco made it, it would live up to that Orgies of Dr. Orloff name.

They tried, however, by adding BDSM inserts of a masked man and three naked women being tortured in scenes that have nothing to do with the plot. I love this idea and wish that movies I have no interest in watching but have to — holiday movies, romantic comedies — had random moments of gratuitous nudity and non-sex sex.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.