Fritz Lang made Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and The Testament of Dr Mabuse decades before CCC Film hired him to make a third movie. The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse was so successful that CCC released an entire series focused on the master criminal between 1960 and 1964.
All six films of those movies are in Eureka’s new box set:
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse: The eponymous master of disguise, Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) re-emerges in the Cold War era after a lengthy absence – and uses all manner of methods to insight murder and mayhem.
The Return of Dr. Mabuse: Brainwashed prison inmates to commit a litany of crimes. Dr. Mabuse evades the German authorities and the FBI.
The Invisible Dr. Mabuse: Dr. Mabuse seeks to use an amazing new invention – a device that renders the user invisible – to his own ends.
The Testament of Dr Mabuse: A remake of Lang’s earlier film, this episode finds the German police tying themselves in knots as they figure out how their adversary could continue his reign of terror from inside an asylum.
The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse: The criminal mastermind comes to possess a weapon capable of unleashing untold destruction.
Directed by Fritz Lang, Harald Reinl, Werner Klingler, Paul May and Hugo Fregonese, the CCC Mabuse series continues Fritz Lang’s legacy while playing into a popular market taste in Germany for adaptations of literary krimis. This Masters of Cinema set collects all six of the 1960s Mabuse films in high definition from 2K restorations.
This Limited Collector’s Edition Box Set of 2000 copies comes in a limited edition hard case featuring new artwork by Tony Stella. It has a limited edition 60-page collector’s book featuring new notes on each film by journalist Holger Haase, a new essay by German film scholar Tim Bergfelder, an archival essay by David Cairns, archival writing by Fritz Lang and notes by Lotte Eisner on Lang’s final unreleased projects.
There are 1080p HD presentations of all six films from 2K restorations of the original film elements undertaken by CCC Original, audio commentaries by David Kalat, an interview with producer and managing director of CCC Film Alice Brauner, introductions to each film by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a video essay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson, an archival interview with Wolfgang Preiss, the Italian cut of The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse and an alternate ending for The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.
I loved this entire set. To read about each movie in it, just click on the title of the film. This is recommended to lovers of krimi, spy films and the history of cinema. What a package by Eureka! You can get it from MVD.
In 1989, Toei launched their V-Cinema line of direct-to-video genre features, inspired by the money that Akira made when it became an OAV. Now, Arrow Video has released V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal, which has nine of those films, “representing some of the best the Japanese crime film has to offer.”
Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage: Detective Joe Kawamura is out for revenge against the men who gunned down his partner, teaming up with a pistol-packing nun who wants the five million dollars stolen from her church.
Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet: Wannabe yakuza Junko gets more than he bargained for when he is given the job of avenging the murder of a fellow gang member.
Stranger: A late-night taxi driver is stalked by the unseen driver of an SUV, who just might have a connection to her shady past.
Carlos: A Brazilian-Japanese petty criminal sees an opportunity to play rival yakuza gangs against each other, but bites off much more than he can chew.
Burning Dogis a heist film about a gang of thieves who plot to rob a US military base in Okinawa, but rising tensions in the group threaten to put the plan in jeopardy.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat: A female assassin is trained to infiltrate a women’s prison and search for Scorpion, a legendary rebellious prisoner hiding in the bowels of the building.
The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses: After his fiancée is killed in the crossfire of a yakuza turf war, a man on the edge remorselessly hunts down the gangsters responsible.
Danger Point: The Road to Hell: Two contract killers’ fragile partnership is tested when their most recent hit starts to have unforeseen consequences.
XX: Beautiful Hunter: Assassin Shion rebels against the fanatical religious order that trained her to be the perfect killer from birth.
In addition to high-definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentations of all nine films, there are nine postcard-sized cards and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Earl Jackson, Daisuke Miyao and Hayley Scanlon. The limited edition packaging features reversible sleeves featuring newly commissioned artwork by Chris Malbon.
To learn more about each of the films, click on the title.
This is a perfect release, filled with movies I never knew I needed. Now, I can’t wait for another collection of these films. Arrow Video is to be thanked for this unexpected masterwork.
Often described as the “Godfather of Hong Kong Cinema,” Chang Cheh made nearly a hundred films during a long career with Shaw Brothers, where he directed such landmark films as The One-Armed Swordsman, Five Deadly Venoms and The Heroic Ones.
Many of his films drew upon Chinese history for inspiration and were based on real people and events. Now, Eureka Classics presents four of his best historical epics in a limited-edition set: Marco Polo, The Pirate, Boxer Rebellion and Four Riders.
Marco Polo: The explorer (Richard Harrison) becomes trapped in a battle between the Mongol Empire and Chinese rebels in the thirteenth century.
The Pirate: Nineteenth-century buccaneer Cheung Po Tsai (Ti Lung) must evade agents of the Imperial Court while attempting to aid the downtrodden residents of a coastal village.
Boxer Rebellion: Chinese patriots use kung fu to protect their nation against invading forces at the turn of the twentieth century.
Four Riders: A Chinese veteran of the Korean War enlists three comrades to help him escape the South Korean Military Police Command after he is falsely accused of murdering an American soldier.
All four films are presented on Blu-ray from HD masters supplied by Celestial Pictures. Extras include two new commentaries by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth, two new commentaries by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, interviews and essays on these films, an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on all four films in this set by writer and critic James Oliver. It’s all limited to 2,000 copies and you can get it from MVD.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
At last, total terror — in the year 1980, that is! Journey back in time to this crucial year in horror and exploitation history and experience the visual nostalgia of newsprint ads, as well as reviews and commentary on films that were released and/or popularized in 1980. From major releases such as Friday the 13th and Fade to Black, to cult items like Windows and Battle Beyond the Stars, contributors spill their guts about their favorite 1980 screamers, shockers and space operas.
This 72-page fanzine is 8.5″ x 5.5″ in black and white, with some pages printed on colored paper, and has a full-color cover. You can get it on Etsy.
In this issue, I wrote “Beaches, Death, Sex and Baby Eating: Joe D’Amato’s 1980,” getting into all of the many movies he made in that wonderful year.
Plus you get pages of ads for some of your favorite movies. There’s nothing else like Drive-In Asylum! Get your issue right now!
Here’s a recap of everything that was on the site.
The Severin set comes with several shorts and documentaries. You can read all about them in our breakdown part one and two.
In addition, I covered several of the movies that played at Scala. You can see the Letterboxd list of these films or click on any of the following links:
Plus, you can also get two other releases of films that played Scala from Severin.
The Severin blu ray release of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-up Zombies!!? has three hours of bonus features, including an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, two commentaries (one by Ray Dennis Steckler and the other by Joe Bob), an interbiew with Carolyn Brandt, deleted scenes, a VHS trailer and a re-release trailer and a radio ad for Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. You can get this from Severin.
Satan’s Sadists and Angels’ Wild Women are available on one blu ray. Extras include commentary on both movies by producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman, outtakes, trailers and TV and radio commercials. You can get this from Severin.
The Brivido Giallo Collection collects the four film series directed by Lamberto Bava. Each film in this set is a standalone fully featured production that was completed between 1987 – 1989. The films stories are not connected, but were collected together for Italian television near the end of the 80s.
Cauldron Films is collecting all four movies — Until Death, Graveyard Disturbance, Dinner with a Vampire, and The Ogre — on blu ray for the first time in a limited edition five disc set with each movie fully uncut and restored from 4K scans of the 35mm film negatives, loaded with brand new cast and crew featurettes by Eugenio Ercolani (including 4 with Lamberto Bava himself) and an exclusive new interview with composer Simon Boswell, all housed in a rigid outer box with four folded posters featuring new artwork by Eric Adrian Lee.
Graveyard Disturbance (1987): I used to have a complicated relationship with Lamberto Bava. And by that, I mean that for every Demons, there’s a Devilfish. But then I realize that I kind of like Blastfighter, love Macabre and even kind of dig Delirium. I always giae him another chance and finally, one day, I came around to liking what Lamberto directed.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: Until Death, The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire and this film.
Originally titled Dentro il cimitero (Inside the Cemetery), this spoof of Italian horror is about five twentysomething teenagers who make a bet with an entire town — which is literally referred to as the kind of place from An American Werewolf In London — to see if they can survive one evening inside a series of catacombs. Not only are there zombies and vampires in there, there’s also death itself.
It all starts off with plenty of promise, as our gang of young punks has the most 80s van ever, complete with an image from Heavy Metal, U2 and Madonna. After the crew shoplifts, they go on the run and straight into supernatural trouble.
The person they’re stealing from? Lamberto. Which is only fair, as he uses this movie to rip off everything from — sorry, spoof or pay homage to — Carnival of Souls and Phenomena to his father’s Black Sunday and any number of zombie movies.
So where does the eating come in? Well, there’s one great scene in here where an entire family of multiple eyed creatures all dine on rotten food. This moment had to have inspired Pan’s Labyrinth.
The Cauldron release of Graveyard Disturbance includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti; interviews with Bava, Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Karl Zinny, Massimo Antonello Geleng and Roberto Ricci; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
Until Death (1988): As I mentioned above, I felt like I had never given Lamberto a fair chance. Then again, whenever I say that, people always remark that I’m always mentioning that I like his movies. Demons is a near-perfect movie but I’ve always qualified that by saying that he had Argento, Franco Ferrin and Dardano Sacchetti on board along with Michele Soavi as assistant director. And then I think, well, you know, I kind of really like Macabre and it has some really grimy stuff in it. A Blade In the Dark, Blastfighter, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance, The Ogre, Demons 2 and Midnight Ripper all have charms. I’ve even come around to liking Delirium e foto di Gioia, Maybe not Monster Shark. But the more I think about it, I really do like Lamberto Bava.
This is the movie that put me over the edge into perhaps even love.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance and Until Death.
There were some hurt feelings about this movie when it was made. It was based on an older script by Dardano Sacchetti, but Lucio Fulci went on record saying that he was planning on making an adaption of The Postman Always Rings Twice with the title Evil Comes Back. Fulci said that Sacchetti wrote it up and sent it to several producers and later found out that when Luciano Martino bought it, his name wasn’t on it. Fulci said, “…because of our friendship I decided not to sue Sacchetti, but I did break off all relations with him.” Sacchetti responded, “The producer of Evil Comes Back didn’t have the budget required, and he gave up to do the film. That’s it. Years later, as the screenplay was mine, I sold it to another producer who used it for a b-movie with Lamberto Bava.”
Gioia Scola really could have been a remembered giallo queen if she’d come along 15 years early. As it is, she was in some of my favorite late 80s films in the genre, including Obsession: A Taste for Fear, Too Beautiful to Die, Suggestionata and Evil Senses.
In this film, she plays Linda, a woman whose husband Luca (Roberto Pedicini) left her eight years ago. All the men of the small village wondered why he’d leave behind such a stunning woman. In fact, this movie could have been called Ogni uomo vuole scopare Linda. She gave birth to Luca’s son and unknown to the town, has since become the wife of the man who helped kill her husband, Carlo (David Brandon).
Together, they run a small hotel near the lake. During one rainy night, Marco (Urbano Barberini) arrives to stay. And it seems like he knows way too much about what’s going on. Her son Alex (Marco Vivio) may as well, as he wakes up every night screaming, dreaming of his father clawing his way out of a muddy grave. She hires Marco as the handyman, but Carlo thinks they’re sleeping together. In no way can this turn out well.
How does Marco know where all the old clothes are kept? How does he already know the family recipes? And why is he so close so quickly with Alex?
What’s intriguing is how close this is in story and tone, yet goes off on its own path, to Bava’s father’s film Shock. The difference is where the father would use camera tricks and tone to create a mood of dread, his son will put you directly into the middle of the muck and grue with comic book lighting and great looking effects from Angelo Mattei. And keeping the family tradition going, Lamberto’s son Fabrizio was the assistant director. How wild that Mario’s grandson was AD on movies like Zoolander 2 and Argento’s Giallo and The Card Player, using the name Roy Bava for those last two movies.
My favorite fact about this movie is that it was released on VHS as The Changeling 2: The Revenge. Trust me, it has nothing to do with The Changeling.
The Cauldron release of Until Death includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth; interviews with Bava, Battaglia, David Brandon and Massimo Antonello Geleng; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
The Ogre (1989): Following the success of the film Demons and Demons 2, this film was announced as part of Bava’s TV movie series. The script, written by Dardano Sacchetti, is pretty much the original script for The House By the Cemetery before Lucio Fulci added to the tale. Seeing as how it was a TV movie, there was some self-censorship, as Bava said that were this a real movie, the ogre would have eaten children.
Cheryl (Virginia Bryant, Demons 2, The Barbarians) is a sexually confused American writer of horror novels who traves to Italy with her husband Tom (Paolo Malco, The New York Ripper, Thunder) and son Bobby — yep, little Bob, but not Giovanni Frezza — to work on her next book.
She begins to have nightmares of childhood memories of being stalked by an ogre and becomes convinced that the house has a curse on it that is bringing her past memories into our reality.
Alex Serra, who was the blind man from the original Demons, also shows up. Speaking of Demons, this movie was released outside of Italy as the third film in that series. As you’ll soon learn from the Demoni sequels, it has nothing to do with the first two films. Even more confusing, this was released on DVD in Germany as Ghosthouse II, the sequel to the Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse/La Casa 3. That movie is confusing, too, as it’s the third movie in the La Casa series, which translates to house in Italian, but has nothing to do with the movie House. Instead, Evil Dead is known as La Casa in Italy.
Want more info on how all that works? Check this article out on La Casa and this article about the Demons movies.
The Cauldron release of The Ogre includes commentary by Rachel Nisbet; interviews with Bava, Geleng and Ricci; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
Dinner With a Vampire (1989): Four actors — Gianni (Riccardo Rossi, the Italian voice of Simba in The Lion King), Rita (Patrizia Pellegrino), Monica (Yvonne Sciò, who was in the Tal Bachman video for “She’s So High”) and Sasha (Valeria Milillo) have won their audition to appear in a new horror movie. As they’re on the way to meet Jurek the director (George Hilton, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris) — who lives in a large castle — they learn that he’s a vampire and has a challenge: he believes that they can kill him.
There are movies within a movie. There’s a hunchbacked assistant named Giles (Daniele Aldrovandi). And there’s lots of gore, particularly at the end. Written by Bava with Dardano Sacchetti, this comedy isn’t going to change your world, but it will entertain you unless you have a major issue with goofy humor.
The Cauldron release of Dinner With a Vampire includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth; interviews with Bava, George Hilton, Geleng and Boswell; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
The set also comes with a soundtrack compilation CD featuring tracks from each Brivido Giallo film curated and supplied by composer Simon Boswell.
This is an incredibly exciting set! Here’s to more Italian TV movies making their way here.
Simon, a fierce Kung Fu master, ventures into the city’s gritty underbelly for answers to his sister’s death. There, a cunning spiritual master deceives him, plotting to snatch his piece of an ancient amulet he shared with her. Unraveling the scheme, Simon plunges fists and feet first into a bone-crushing battle for the fate of the world against an alien army of karate wizards, dragons, a new wave clone band, talking pigs and mystical chickens!
One of the most bizarre domestic martial arts movies ever made, Furious throws the 1980s home video chopsocky craze in a blender with elements of the supernatural, horror and superhero genres, by way of an improvised MTV video. Featuring Hollywood martial arts legends Simon and Phillip Rhee (Best of the Best, The Matrix, Inception) in their first ever starring roles, and also the choreographers for all the non-stop action on display in the film.
This cult martial arts classic is available for the first time ever on Blu-ray with hours of new interviews and bonus features:
Limited Edition slipcase by The Dude and a limited edition throwing star key tag
New director-approved SD master from original tape elements
Archival commentary with co-director Tim Everitt
Commentary with Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club and Peter Kuplowsky of the Toronto International Film Festival
High Kicking In Hollywood: Tom Sartori interview
The Kung Fu Kid: Tim Everitt interview
North American No-Budget Martial Arts Cinema Primer – video essay by Justin Decloux
Rhee Brothers Career Overview – Justin Decloux video essay
Archival Scarecrow Video Podcast with Tim Everitt (2013)
Furious New Wave Band – behind the scenes Super 8 footage
Scorched Earth Policy: full six song EP (1987)
Cinema Face: live in concert (1986)
Tom Sartori 1980s music video reel
Tom Sartori Super 8 short films reel
Original trailers
Visual Vengeance trailers
“Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set
Reversible sleeve featuring original VHS art
Folded mini-poster reproduction of original Furious one sheet
2-sided insert with alternate art
Pre-order information will be added when it’s announced.
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