EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. at the Music Box Theater in Chicago (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void. 

Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re eager for you to shock us, titillate us, and perhaps even thrill us a bit. Oh, and you’ve brought Carroll Baker with you! Please, show us the tale you’ve crafted!

Released in Italy as Orgasmo, this was released as one of the first X-rated movies in the U.S., which was definitely played up in all of the ads especially because it had Baker in the movie. She had left America a single mother with two children and her prospects weren’t great in Hollywood. In Italy, despite making movies that she said “What they think is wonderful is not what we might,” she found a career. Later, she would admit that it showed her an entirely different world and brought her back to feeling alive again.

What’s confusing is that Lenzi’s next movie was released as Paranoia in Italy and A Quiet Place to Kill in America.

I love this interview that she did with Tank Magazine, answering if she ever did any avant-garde projects: “Some of the films in Europe, of course, but a lot of them I haven’t even seen. The one I’m curious about is called Baba Yaga; it was a really far out, wild, cartoonish sort of thing. I play the title character, a 1,500-year-old witch, and all my sisters were witches, too. I didn’t have to be completely naked, but in every Italian film, there was a scene where you had to show your breasts. Usually, I was talking on the telephone or reading a book. One day they announced a nude scene – I couldn’t believe it. But the make-up artist and hairdresser were already there, dying the other girls’ pubic hair to match the hair on their heads.”

In this story, Kathryn West (played by Baker) is a glamorous American widow who moves to Italy just weeks after her wealthy older husband’s death. She settles into a huge villa, but her life feels lonely and boring until Peter enters the picture. His free-spirited nature shakes her out of her rut, and soon he moves in with his sister, Eva. However, things aren’t what they seem—they are not actually siblings, and their relationship evolves into a complicated love triangle. When Kathryn tries to break free from this arrangement, Peter and Eva keep her prisoner, constantly keeping her under the influence of drugs and alcohol while playing the same haunting song on repeat, driving her to the brink of insanity and suicidal thoughts. That’s what happens when you get gaslit and everyone is feeding you pills. Don’t worry — everyone pays for their sins by the end.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a mature actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you appreciate melodramatic twists, layered narratives, and visually striking sex scenes, then it’s time to indulge in this film. If you can’t make it to the Music Box, you can find it as part of The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection set from Severin, which also has So Sweet…So Peverse, A Quiet Place to Kill and Knife of Ice.

John Dahl made plenty of neo-noir — Red Rock West, Kill Me Again, and The Last Seduction — and oh yeah, he directed Joy Ride, too. Writer Bill Geddie was Barbara Walters’s business partner and helped create The View. Together, they made an American giallo.

Seattle medical examiner Dr. David Krane (Ray Liotta) finds a matchbook at a crime scene that reminds him of the one he saw when his wife, Mary (Stellina Rusich), was killed. When he learns that Dr. Martha Briggs (Linda Fiorentino) has a way to transfer memories with Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CSF), he gets samples of his dead wife’s and the murder victim’s spinal fluid and shoots himself up with it, which allows him to relive those murders.

This is what we call bullshit giallo science, kind of like being able to see someone’s last moments of life through their eyeball or that people with the XYY chromosome have a criminal tendency.

Krane’s co-worker, Curtis Avery (David Paymer), looks at the sketch of the killer Krane has made and says that it’s Eddie Dutton (Kim Coates). Krane arrives at a hotel where Dutton is hiding and gets into a fight; the criminal is shot by Detective Don Bresler (Peter Coyote). As a result of all this, Krane is fired, but steals Dutton’s spinal fluid on the way out.

It turns out that Krane has been on a downward spiral. He was a drunk, asleep in the front yard on the night that his pregnant wife was killed. As he has more flashbacks, he starts to have heart attacks due to the side effects of the fluids. That’s when he discovers that the baby inside his wife wasn’t his. 

Detective Stewart Gleick (Christopher McDonald) reveals that Detective Joseph Bodner is the father. He’d met Mary when they testified against Bresler, who is a corrupt cop. Ah, it all makes sense now. And hey — Kim Cattrall is Mary’s sister. So there’s that.

Roger Ebert said, “In the annals of cinematic goofiness, Unforgettable deserves a place of honor. This is one of the most convoluted, preposterous movies I’ve seen—a thriller crossed with lots of Mad Scientist stuff, plus wild chases, a shoot-out in a church, a woman taped to a chair in a burning room, an exploding university building, adultery, a massacre in a drugstore, gruesome autopsy scenes and even a moment when a character’s life flashes before her eyes, which was more or less what was happening to me by the end of the film.”

He makes it sound even better.

But is it a giallo? Well, it was released in Italy as Specchio della memoria, which translates as Mirror of Memory.

That would be a resounding yes.

If you’re going to watch a Steven Seagal movie, let this be the one you pick. He plays Casey Ryback, chief petty officer and culinary specialist on the USS Missouri. As the ship sails off to be decommissioned, he starts making a meal for the commanding officer, Captain Adams (Patrick O’Neal), despite what the executive officer, Commander Krill (Gary Busey), wants. Why is he bringing in food and entertainment — like Jordan Tate (Erika Eleniak), Playboy Playmate for July 1989, just like Eleniak in real life — on board?

That’s because he’s working with William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones), a former CIA operative who is now a terrorist. After Ryback is locked in the kitchen, he takes over the boat, working with Krill, who kills Adams. They want to take the ship’s Tomahawk missiles and load them onto a hijacked North Korean submarine, where they will be sold to a foreign army that will possibly start World War III.

Ryback is a former Navy SEAL with extensive training in counterterrorism tactics who was screwed over by the system, and Adams took on the role of his cook so he could finish out his Navy career. Now they went and got him angry, and he’s ready to take out every terrorist, even teaching Jordan how to fight back. This is the best use of Seagal, as the villains get so much screen time and you can’t wait to see him finally go nuts on some terrorists.

Director Andrew Davis also made Above the Law with Seagal (that one is good), as well as The Fugitive, Code of Silence, The Final Terror, Holes, Collateral Damage and more. He was also the DP on Mansion of the Doomed, which blows my mind.

Based on a spec script by J. F. Lawton called Dreadnought, Seagal actually turned this down at first, having issues with his character teaming with a woman who jumps out of a cake. Yes, really.

The Arrow Video release of this movie has a new 4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative by Arrow Films approved by director Andrew Davis; new audio commentary with director Andrew Davis and writer J.F. Lawton; interviews with Davis, Erika Eleniak, Damian Chapa and visual effects supervisor William Mesa; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Vern and a serial fiction by Martyn Pedler. You can get it on 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.

It took me literally five watches to get through Evil Dead Rise. In my past hater days, I would have just said something like, “Well, I already saw Demons 2,” but that’s not very productive. Films deserve to be seen, and my mindset did not jibe with what I was watching.

Maybe I’ve finally reached a point where the fifth Evil Dead movie isn’t all that exciting.

The thought filled my heart with dread. What would 16-year-old me, the one who watched Evil Dead II every single day, that a few years later would be one of two people in the theater for Army of Darkness, think?

Maybe I don’t want to grow up. It’s just too confusing.

Lee Cronin, who directed and wrote this movie, also made The Hole In the Ground. His Evil Dead movie came about after a period of great excitement over the reimagining. Fede Álvarez was making a sequel to that movie, Sam and Ivan Raimi were making Evil Dead 4 or Army of Darkness 2, and after all that, the seventh film would bring together Ash Williams and Mia Allen. Then the TV series came along, and when that was canceled by the fourth season, any talk of new movies ended. Until we got this.

And I wasn’t too excited.

But then it kicked off with some teens at the lake, some possessions and a levitating girl decapitating a boy while an incredible title card rose from the bloody water.

Alright, I was in.

Guitar tech Beth (Lily Sullivan) has learned she’s pregnant and needs to be near her family, which includes her tattoo artist single mother sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her kids, Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). They live in the Monde Apartments, a nearly condemned building in Los Angeles that was rocked by an earthquake that brought a book and three records to the land of the unpossessed. Of course, Danny is a DJ and throws those records on the turntable — Bruce Campbell voiceover cameo alert — and they reveal that a priest was able to bring the Deadites to our world with the Naturom Demonto.

He gets blood all over the book, which we all know isn’t good, as the aftershocks and power outages continue to assault their home. Ellie is soon possessed and tries to kill everyone, but before she dies, she makes Beth promise to protect her children. And then she’s back from the dead and doing anything but.

What follows is a blood-spraying, gore-filled battle between the Deadite-possessed humans — most of the family becomes an intertwined creature — and the survivors, Beth and Kassie. Is there a shotgun? Is there a chainsaw? And is there a wood chipper, too?

Yet this has the same issue every reimagining has. It has the blood, the book, all those elements, but it forgets the anarchy. What’s missing is the weird mix of goofiness and kids in the woods making something with no archetype or rules. We know what will happen every moment, as if it is predestined, with nothing shocking outside of the things engineered to be as such. Much like how the streaming Hellraiser forgot the sex and the streaming Texas Chainsaw Massacre forgot to be frightening, this has a menu of everything that would be on the model kit of an Evil Dead movie, but it’s missing the intangible. There’s no feeling of getting behind the protagonists. Sure, a cheese grater gets used as a weapon, but this film should have the DNA of a film series that spent forty minutes with a man’s own hand punching himself in the face. It should do something that makes us feel something. The absence of this anarchy is a disappointment that’s hard to ignore.

There’s some to like, but I want to love. I want to revel in the lunacy of what this film could be, instead of settling for what it is. This had 1,720 gallons of blood, but not as many ounces of magic as I wanted it to have. Honestly, they could have skipped the records and book, which would have been another possession film.

But would anyone have gone to the theater—yes, this even got out of streaming and into the big time—to see that?

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this movie has audio commentary with director Lee Cronin and actors Alyssa Sullivan and Lily Sullivan; interviews with Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Anna-Maree Thomas, special make-up effects designer Luke Polti, editor Bryan Shaw, sound designer Peter Albrechtsen, composer Stephen McKeon and Cronin and Albrechtsen by Glenn Kiser, director of the Dolby Institute. There are featurettes, a short directed by Cronin, behind-the-scenes video clips and still gallery, concept artwork gallery, storyboard gallery, a trailer and TV commercials, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Gingold. You can order this from MVD.

Directed by Mike Stasko, who wrote the script with Jakob Skrzypa and Alex Forman, this has appearances by Night of the Living Dead‘s Judith O’Dea, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Tim & Eric’s David Liebe Hart and Saw VI’s Simon Reynolds.

Dracula (Craig Gloster) is from space — he has a son, Dylan (Robert Kemeny), too! — and they’ve come back to Earth to kill everyone — all in black and white. He had once attacked the family of Roy MacDowell (Erik Helle) and killed most of them, making the entire town think that Roy is a killer. When Roy’s daughter Susan (Charlotte Bondy) is killed, everyone blames him, but his daughter Mary (Jessica Antovski) is ready to convince Police Chief Ed Clarke (Andrew Bee) that there really are aliens. She joins with Officer James Wallace (Rashaun Baldeo) and local tough guy Wayne (Oliver Georgiou) to save her town.

With an evil council of vampire aliens that includes Coppola’s Dracula (Martin Ouellette), Vampira (O’Dea) and Nosferatu (David Liebe Hart), a store called Ed’s Wood & Hardware, a public jerk off bandit played by Kaufman, tons of gore and a heart that beats right because it’s making fun with, not at, old movies, this is one to find and love.

You can order this on Blu-ray and DVD from MVD.

Back when people thought the internet was a positive thing, this movie generated so much online buzz that New Line Cinema used web feedback to reshoot for 5 days, most of which was spent feeding Samuel Jackson lines with the f-word.

It was also the first movie where Hollywood learned that memes and online chatter do not equal box office, and then, like people getting that Men In Black light to the eyes, they forgot and did it again. And then again. And then some more.

After seeing a gang slaying, there’s no way Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) is making it to Los Angeles alive. I mean, the guy he’s narcin on, Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), just set a whole bunch of pheromone-sprayed venomous snakes loose on a plane and then marked everyone with a Hawaii lei to be killed.

FBI agents Neville Flynn and John Sanders (Jackson and Mark Houghton) are going to try and protected everyone on the plane, from flight attendant Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies)  and rapper Clarence “Three Gs” Dewey to Mercedes Harbont (Rachel Blanchard), her dog Mary-Kate, senior light attendant Grace (Lin Shaye) and, well, everybody on this plane once those snakes come on our and start biting faces.

David Dalessandro is a University of Pittsburgh associate vice chancellor of university development who found the time to write this script back in 1992 based on an article he read about Indonesian brown tree snakes climbing into planes during World War II.

Initially, this was going to be directed by Ronny Yu before David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2, Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco) took over.

Even though the movie features 450 snakes from 30 different species, most of the ones in principal moments are either animatronic or CGI. That’s because real snakes don’t move around that much and aren’t that fast.

The best part? If you watch this on basic cable, Samuel Jackson yells, “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!” And here you thought it would be the on-the-nose use of Cobra Starship for this movie’s theme.

The Arrow 4K UHD releaseof this film has a new 4K restoration by Arrow Films; new audio commentary by critics Max Evry and Bryan Reesman; an archival cast and crew audio commentary, featuring director David R. Ellis, actor Samuel L. Jackson, producer Craig Berenson, associate producer Tawny Ellis, VFX supervisor Eric Henry and second unit director Freddie Hice; Snakes on a Page, a brand new mini-documentary exploring the movie tie-in novelization phenomenon, featuring publisher Mark Miller, historian David Spencer and Christa Faust, author of the Snakes on a Plane novelization; archival features; a music video; a gag reel and easter eggs; trailers and TV ads; an image gallery; a South Pacific Airlines safety instruction card; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Daniel Burnett and Charlie Brigden.

You can get this on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from MVD.

Neo-noir dystopian science fiction? Sure. But also giallo.

Strange Days was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. At once 20 minutes into the future and thirty years in the past, it still feels remarkably vital.

Criminals are committing crimes and making SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) discs that allow people to relive their murders and assaults. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) was once an LAPD officer, but now he works the black market, selling these memories. 

Meanwhile, Burton Steckler (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Dwayne Engelman (William Fichtner) track Iris (Brigitte Bako), who is wearing a SQUID helmet. She takes whatever she filmed and hides it in Lenny’s car, all while he pines over her best friend — and his lost love — rock star Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who has landed a new man, record industry boss Philo Gant (Michael Wincott).

While his car is being towed, Lenny is drinking away his pain with his only friends, detective Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore) and limousine driver and bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett). When Lenny is given another disk, it shows him Iris being assaulted and killed. More than that, he lives through it. He goes on the run with Mace, as whatever he has on that disk she left in his car is enough to send Steckler and Engelman after him.

It’s all tied to rapper Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), who was with Iris when he was pulled over by Steckler and Engelman and shot in the streets, killed over the anti-police lyrics in his songs. Philo has been recording his own people using the SQUID hardware with women. Lenny finds him dead, killed by Max, who has been with Faith. As if that’s not enough stabbing in the back, Max literally knifes Lenny, who removes it just in time to send his former friend hurtling to the pavement. He leaves Faith alone, heading back to Mace, who has been in love with him for a long time.

Mayor Palmer Strickland (Josef Sommer) is given all the info and stops a near-riot just moments before Mace and Lenny share a kiss at midnight. 

Wikipedia refers to this as a techno-thriller, tech-noir, and a futuristic erotic thriller. Or, like I said, giallo with bullshit giallo science. It has a gorgeous femme fatale with Lewis — who sang for real — and a protagonist obsessed with seeing her one more time, even if it’s past sex recorded and lived through, even if that feels empty.

I wear yellow glasses, and when I have them on, terms like adult thriller and neo-noir appear as they should: giallo.

Back in 1948, Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson) is killed during a robbery, and her husband, Roman (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed this movie), is executed for the crime, but not before he whispers something to Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a reporter.

In 1991, private detective Mike Church (Branagh) is looking into the identity of a woman whom he names Grace (also Thompson), who has appeared– mute, amnesiac and with nightmares — at the orphanage that raised him. Mike asks his friend Pete Dugan (Wayne Knight) to publish her info in the paper, while hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) tries to use his skills to bring her mind back. She doesn’t, but does remember a lot about the lives of Margaret and Roman. And oh yeah — Franklyn is really Frankie, the son of Margaret and Roman’s housekeeper Inga (Hanna Schygulla), Grace is artist Amanda Sharp who paints scissor-themed photos and — man, is this an exposition dump? — Frankie killed Margaret with scissors when Roman rebuffed his mother’s love. The scissors were put in Roman’s hand, and that brings us to now, as Franklyn tries the same thing on Mike and Amanda.

Roger Ebert said that this was similar to the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, saying, “Dead Again is Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrating that he has a natural flair for bold theatrical gesture. If Henry V, the first film he directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, Dead Again will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock — and the Olivier of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I do not suggest Branagh is already as great a director as Welles and Hitchcock, although he has a good start in that direction. What I mean is that his spirit, his daring, is in the same league. He is not interested in making timid movies.”

But hey, that ending, where — spoilers — a scissor sculpture kills the killer? Ever seen Tenebre? That said, I do like the twist that Mike was actually Margaret and Grace was Roman.