Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.
The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,
Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).
Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?
This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.
Hsiang Ying (Chia Ling) has been betrayed by her master, who tells her that he killed her father before tossing her off a cliff and when she survives that and a battle with wolves, he locks her inside a cage. She’s saved by Ku (Chiang-Lung Wen) but it turns out that the real killer is his uncle, a maniac who has two skulls that sit on his shoulders and, when called upon, can fly around and bite people.
Now known as the Heartless Woman, she goes on episodic adventures that have her battling ripoffs of other martial arts movies, such as a one armed boxer (Phillip Ko!) and a monkey king. Like many kung fu films from Taiwan, the budget is low and the imagination is high. I wish it spent all the time with its heroine instead of going into comedy, but I still had a blast watching it. Seriously, the final bad guy may have the most amazing weaponry ever.
Also known as Revengful Swordswoman, this was released by 21st Century.
You can watch this on Tubi. You can also get it on blu ray from Gold Ninja Video.
You remember that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to explain why he didn’t steal Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure?”
I’d like to hear whoever did the music for this movie to explain how they added a “da na na” to the theme from Halloween. Then again, there’s plenty more that this movie owes to that film.
A killer with a kitchen knife is on the prowl, killing off college kids. And he’s on the way to Lanier College during finals.
Meanwhile, a fraternity stages a mass shooting to help their members pass a chemistry test. How does this plan work? Who comes up with such a plan?
While students prepare for the end of the year, the killer is hiding among them. We have Courtney, who is the Final Girl, of course. Her roommate is Lisa, who is all into the hot professor. Well, not really hot. He’s a professor, though.
For some reason, all of the pledges can’t dare anyone. But Gary is in love with Janet and pins her, so he gets punished by being tied up to a tree, his underwear filled with ice and then sprayed with shaving cream. What? Where did this ritual come from? Who goes through with this? Even the rest of the town, like the security guard, follow these rules. What is the deal with this school?
Well, he’s tied up and the killer gets him. Then it gets his girlfriend, too. While that’s going on, Wildman, a frat guy, is looking for pain pills when he gets killed by a Universal weight machine. His friend Mark tries to find him and he gets killed.
Then we have Radish, who isn’t gay in the movie but would totally be a proud out character if this was made after 1981. He’s constantly looking for killers and has a great poster collection of old films. All his knowledge of murder doesn’t help, as he’s instantly killed.
Lisa tries to model for her boyfriend in the nude, but she gets killed, too. And now we’re down to one and the killer even catches an arrow and stabs the coach with it when he tries to save Courtney. But then he falls into a hole and she stabs him to death. That’s it. That’s the fight he puts up.
Written and directed by Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend Is a Vampire), this is pretty much Halloweenwith a killer who was too lazy to get a mask (he was also the fight coordinator for the film).
That said, I wasn’t bored, I laughed out loud at many of the things that Radish did and said, and I enjoyed the arrow catching scene. You’ll be filled with questions. Like, how much chaffing did the short shorts of the 80’s cause?
Back when I was a kid, I read so many Jack Chick comics. That’s because while the tracts are given away for free, the full-size comic books were always in Christian stores, and those were the only places that sold craft supplies in my small town. Chick’s Crusadercomic book had six issues about Alberto Rivera, an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of Chick’s anti-Catholic theories.
Rivera claimed that he was sent to a Catholic seminary at the age of seven, and two years later, as his mother lay dying, she reportedly saw ugly creatures swarming her deathbed and realized she was headed for a Christless eternity on account of being Catholic. At her grave, nine-year-old Alberto promised to discover the truth. But before that, the Vatican sent him as a deep-cover priest with the mission of infiltrating Protestant organizations and sabotaging their leaders.
This is when Alberto learned that the Vatican was behind Freemasonry, and they worship the Virgin Mary because they’re really simping for the Whore of Babylon. In 1965, he denounced the church in a stadium filled with 50,000 people, going to war with the Jesuits, who, like the NWO, if you’re NWO, you’re NWO for life. They tortured him so severely that his lungs collapsed and he went into an iron lung. As Radiohead sang, “Faith, you’re driving me away. You do it every day. You don’t mean it, but it hurts like hell.”
Alberto asked Jesus for forgiveness, was miraculously healed, and so moved a Jesuit official that he was allowed to escape Spain and rescue his sister Maria, a nun who had also been targeted by the church, and barely made it through as she was “…bleeding to death from flagellation and other mistreatment.” Also: Jim Jones was a Jesuit.
But let’s ask Cornerstone magazine for the, well, gospel truth. “Is Alberto’s story true? No! Our intensive investigation reveals his police record, his investment schemes, his bad check‑writing, his contradictory testimony, his fabricated educational record, and his reported family abuse.”
Alberto’s story was inconsistent and shifted over time. In a 1964 statement, he claimed to have left the Catholic Church in July of 1952. Yet later, he said it was 1967, which is not a minor tweak, you know? But even after 1967, he continued promoting the Catholic Church.
Rivera had some documentation that he said proved he was a priest. It didn’t.
His sister was a maid, not a nun.
He claimed he was a priest in 1963, but he was really married with children in the U.S.
Rivera may have lied — or stretched the truth– or been compromised by a global conspiracy — about those things, but he had no problem saying the Jesuit order was behind, well, everything. Communism? Jesuits. Islam? Jesuits. Nazism? Also Jesuits.
World Wars, economic recessions, Jonestown and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, who was Catholic? Jesuits.
He claimed that the Catholic Church was hard at work spreading homosexuality and abortion, plus some mic drops like how the popes are all antichrists and the Catholic Church worships the Whore of Babylon (two mentions in one article, so SEO scores will be high for this). Alberto was also ahead of the curve of being all in on hating Islam, as he claimed that Muhammad was manipulated by the Catholic Church to invent Islam as a tool to destroy Jews and rival Christians, and that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, was a Catholic nun stationed at an Arabian monastery, acting on instructions from a bishop to marry Muhammad and launch a new religion.
But how far could Rivera go? How about the idea that the Vatican staged Fatima and picked the town because it’s the name of Muhammad’s daughter? And they also hired a Muslim killer to murder Pope John Paul II in the hopes that the guilt of that fact would make more Muslims Catholic. But aren’t they all a Catholic scheme?
This is old school non-right-wing conspiracy madness, the kind I love the most. The kind where Alberto would claim that people were constantly breaking into his home. And when he joined up with Jack Chick, well, things went wild. Obviously, the Vatican did more than start Islam. Communism, the Masons, the KKK, the mob, the Illuminati, the New Age movement, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons…they made them all. And they can’t wait to start a new inquisition.
These claims were so over the top that there was a protest by both Catholics and Evangelicals to the point that Catholic and even Protestant bookstore owners removed Chick’s product. In response, My Name? . . . In the Vatican? was released, in which Chick doubled down.
Catholic Answers said, “The impact of Alberto Rivera on Jack Chick’s universe is difficult to underestimate. It was Rivera who provided Chick with his most sensationalistic, most anti-Catholic claims and allowed Chick’s conspiracy theories to grow increasingly complex and bizarre.”
Anyways…Elijah’s Secret.
The YouTube description for this movie says, “Please enjoy this free SD screener. By watching this, you agree to share your thoughts about this Christian-based film by writing a review and posting it on AT LEAST one of the following sites: YouTube (comment section), the Harmberg Brothers website (link below), Facebook (please tag #elijahssecret and #harmbergbrothers), Twitter, your blog, and any other applicable websites. Furthermore, if you like what you see (we are confident you will), please tell your friends, family, church congregation(s), coworkers, etc., about this film and send them the website link. Thank you, we are looking forward to reading your review(s)!”
Let’s do this.
Professor Elijah Steinbeck (Wayne Harmberg, the writer and producer) has a secret. He’s not really a Baptist preacher. Instead, he’s a Jesuit who has been tasked with converting the church from the inside out as well as controlling the soul by conducting human trials.
He never counted on Captain Christopher Holmes (Casey Harmberg, who directed, wrote, produced, and did the wardrobe). Holmes is more than just a U.S. Army officer. He’s also a writer for Stars and Stripes and a God-fearing American.
According to the official site, “Additionally, this movie was filmed entirely on an iPhone 6S (a new and rapidly growing technique among filmmakers), making it among the very first feature-length films to be shot this way. It was also edited using Cyberlink PowerDirector 14, a state-of-the-art editing software with 3D, CGI and picture-enhancing capabilities. Prepare to be stunned!”
Forget being stunned, you will be gobsmacked by high-ranking Jesuit overlords meeting in public parks with no mics, clad in hoods that resemble hoodies more than holy vestments. This is also packed with footage from other anti-Jesuit films, a scene where our hero reads the Jack Chick publication The Secret History of the Jesuits and the kind of special effects that would make Neil Breen laugh.
Obviously, I wrote over a thousand words about this, and I’m going to watch it for the third time in a row.
Written by Ralph Griffin and Peter Lalonde, this is the kind of Satanic Panic that I love. Lalonde would go on to produce and write the Left Behind and Apocalypse: Caught in the Eye of the Storm movies.
This gets the most basic thing about He-Man incorrect. He-Man said. “I have the power,” not “I am the power.” That said, Thundercats was super Satanic.
Eastern mysticism was the boogeyman of this, as teachers used visualization in school, and that’s how they were taking over your child’s soul. All of the lessons — caring for yourself, we are all one people, meditation — are just Satan laughing as he spreads his wings. If this keeps up, we’ll have a cashless society, and kids will be killing each other as they play Dungeons and Dragons. Or Nintendo.
While I find these artifacts of the past amusing, I also know that the Satanic Panic never ended. Now it’s Muslims, and you can be super religious and also incredibly happy that brown people are being pushed out of your country. Didn’t Jesus — a long-haired black man who spent time with sex workers and lepers — throw the changemakers out of the temple?
Aurora Productions, which made this, isreally The Family International, an American new religious movement founded in 1968 by David Brandt Berg. They also went under the names The Children of God, Teens for Christ, The Family of Love and The Family. It’s the cult that Rose McGowan, River, and Joaquin Phoenix were born into. Berg mainly communicated by letter until he died in 1984. That’s when his wife, Karen Zerby, became the Queen and Prophetess.
According to Wikipedia, she “… married Steve Kelly (also known as Peter Amsterdam), an assistant of Berg’s whom Berg had handpicked as her “consort”. Kelly took the title of “King Peter” and became the face of TFI, speaking in public more often than either Berg or Zerby. There have been multiple allegations of child sexual abuse made by past members, including against Zerby.”
The music, however…
Take it from the copy on the box: “A startling new music video! It will send you racing one footstep ahead of danger and death! One heartbeat away from your wildest dream of love! A music video that will take your imagination by storm! It will plunge you into the dwelling place of the damned, then thrust you into a dimension beautiful beyond description!”
There’s a song about a green door in this that goes from fun to fear so quickly, as well as “Watch Out for 666.” This is the kind of insanity that the Catholic Church could never provide me as a child, and if they did make stuff like this, I would have never lapsed. a
“A private investigator, descendant from a line of werewolves, who tries to solve the murder of her uncle and discovers a political conspiracy.”
I was down with that, but then you told me Lindsay Lohan is in it?
My dream has always been for Lindsay to just make giallo, as if she were Carroll Baker. Yet finding out she was in an Underworld rip-off that feels shot in the same Eurohorror graveyards where stuff like The Iron Rose was made? Did I create this movie in an alternate world and send it to myself?
So what if it’s mostly long, involved political BS, and it seems like every time Lohan is on screen, she’s on a green screen, acting much as Bruce Willis did in that last gasp of doing everything he could before his illness claimed his mind?
Give me more of this.
Werewolves are at war with one another in the middle of, well, Brexit. There’s also MMA. There’s our werewolf heroine, private investigator Kristy Wolfe (Charlotte Beckett), and yes, this movie is dumb enough to give her the surname Wolfe. And as for Lohan, she’s Patricia Sherman, First Lady of the European Federation and a vampire who can go out in the daylight.
Imagine if someone made Nightwatch and it made even less sense!
And Daniel Hugh Kelly from Hardcastle and McCormick is in it?
Lohan’s first movie since The Canyons, this is the kind of inspired junk I wish she’d do more of, rather than Netflix holiday movies. But that’s what the public wants and sees as success. I want her in a diaphonous gown, carrying a candleabra, facing down the supernatural in an Italian castle filled with dust and cobwebs.
I learned from this that vampires and werewolves can read one another’s minds. I never heard that before.
Everyone in this is shot on green screen, and often, it’s edited together to make it seem like people are in the same room. You can make fun of movies like this, but if Jess Franco were alive, these are the exact films he’d be doing, except Lina Romay would be scisorring Lindsay Lohan and yes, I would watch that.
The fourth of nine anime movies produced by the Japanese religious organization Happy Science, this is based on Ryuho Okawa’s third book, The Nine Dimensions: Unveiling the Laws of Eternity.
Happy Science is a Japanese religious organization founded in 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, who went from being a stock trader to the present incarnation of a supreme deity named El Cantare. He can also speak with the dead. They’ve produced 11 anime and 16 live-action movies.
What do they believe? On their site, they say, “Human beings are spiritual beings. We are souls residing in physical bodies. The center of it is our mind. We reincarnate many times between this world and the other world, gaining different life experiences and growing infinitely as individual souls.
God (Buddha) exists and has continued to lead (guide) Humanity – past, present and future. These are the spiritual Truths that Happy Science works to spread. Our mission and purpose are to explore what true happiness is based on these eternal Truths and make this world a more peaceful and prosperous place.
Our work takes us beyond traditional religious realms into politics, education, movies, music, and more. We strive to put the teachings of love, enlightenment, and creation of utopia into practice in every area of life.”
According to Wikipedia, “…the organization’s political wing, the Happiness Realization Party, promotes political views that include support for Japanese military expansion, support for the use of nuclear deterrence and denial of historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the comfort women issue in South Korea. Some other stances include support of infrastructure spending, natural disaster prevention, urban development and dam construction. They also advocate fiscal conservatism, strengthening the US-Japan alliance and a virtue-based leadership.”
Let’s talk about this movie.
Ryuta, Patrick, and Roberto have traveled from Japan to New York City, where they visit a museum exhibit on Thomas Edison. They see a spirit phone, which allows people to talk to the dead. You may think Edison never invented this, but in an interview with American Magazine, he claimed that “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” This device would not use “…any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called “mediums”, but by scientific methods. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.”
The guys then meet a shaman, God Eagle, who has a message from Edison that gives Ryuta the knowledge needed to make his own spirit phone. After meeting Yuko, a religious girl, they can finally go to the next world, where Ryuta and Yuko discover they were married many years ago in Atlantis, and they battle enemies like Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler, who has his own evil elephant. The good news? Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, and Mother Theresa all appear as angels sent to our reality to guide us. Yes, Helen Keller can see, speak and hear now; she’s also blonde with blue eyes, like all of the angels in this religion.
This is probably where I should get into the fact that cat aliens came to our planet first, but after they founded Atlantis and Mu — All bound for Mu Mu Land — because of Satan.
Lord El Cantare shows up — he was also La Mu, Thoth, Rient Arl Croud, Ophealis, Hermes and Buddha — along with Moses, Jesus and Confucius. You should also know that the ninth dimension of Heaven is filled with centaurs. Also: humans are reincarnations of immortal spirits, angels and demigods who have lost their memories after leaving the Spirit World.
And Florence Nightingale informs us, “A lot of people on Earth panic when they pass away and become a spirit. Some don’t believe in their death and cling to the place they’ve died, or their families, and cause a lot of trouble.”
This is a very capitalist religion, as Thomas Edison is not the man who destroyed Tesla, but instead someone who used his inventions to help mankind. He was also Johannes Gutenberg. Other angels include Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita and the boss of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, who are angels sent to give Japan a strong yen.
There’s also a movie theater in Heaven that shows your life to everyone you knew when you die. It also reveals your thoughts to everyone you know, and they vote on whether you go to Heaven or Hell. It’s a good thing angels will go to Hell to save you, because my relatives are going to watch me onanistically savoring the films of Madison, Belladonna and CJ Laing so many times that they’ll wonder what the plot of my life was.
Well, there are three Hells, and it looks like mine will be The Hell of the Bloody Pond, which looks like Amsterdam, and I’ll be trapped in a bloody pool, unable to fulfill my lust, as if I were Ms. Jones at the end of the first movie. If you got that, you’ll be there with me.
In this religion, you can make the sign of the cross twice, then draw a pentagram to destroy a demon. Spoiler: You get the Heaven or Hell you wanted most, so if you were a salaryman, you’ll be working in an office for demons for all eternity.
But the best news of all? Every religion and myth is true! Whether you believe in God, Jesus, Odin, Osiris, Hermes or Buddha, they are all El Cantare. Don’t be cynical. Cynical people go to Hell.
Man, I loved this. What an all-over-the-place bit of magic. Some people may get bored — or frightened — by it. Not me. Sign me up.
Directed and written by Greg Robbins, this is the kind of movie that makes me go nuts, nearly jumping around the room while my wife wonders why she married me. She was watching part of it and said, “None of the words match people’s mouths, and why are there Spanish subtitles?” That’s because I’ll watch a movie however I can get it, like Russian OK.ru movies with long ads and screamed foreign translations, or even trying to find old gialli on adult sites and being freaked out by the sexual gymnastics on display before I get to what I really want, black gloved hands killing pretty folks.
But I digress.
Shot in Pittsburgh and Carnegie, PA — you have no idea how proud this makes me — this is the story of Sheri (Christina DeMarco), who, as the title will tell you — don’t worry, they say it out loud and even have the name appear in the ending — just wants to dance. However, she soon learns that she has leukemia. As if life wasn’t bad enough, her mother died when she was just a baby. Yes, Sheri was in the car when a demon hit her mother with an 18-wheeler in a scene that is a little Duel, a bit Maximum Overdrive and lots of Final Destination 2. Raised by her father, Vince (Robbins, vanity is one of the seven deadly sins, but vanity projects are my favorite), she was just trying to navigate the high school years of boys, friends, and shopping.
But then, she gets powers.
Yes, Sheri is somehow incredibly healthy, still able to dance, despite being in Stage 3. She also gets the power of thought projection, so when she touches people, she heals their trauma by showing them Christ being nailed to the cross.
Working with Pastor Tony (Scott Kerschbaumer), her powers are able to stop crime by 89%, halt Hollywood from making anti-Christian movies (“In Variety, it says the next big three movies scheduled for release have been shelved by the studio executives! It reports that they say that they may harm family values, and they’re never gonna release them!”) and halves the production of pornography. She is also able to save some of her friends, including a few who wanted nothing to do with the church.
This also has Eddie Mekka, who was Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, in the cast, as well as Peter Kent (who was a Terminator in the arcade game for Terminator 2, as well as showing up in Dead Heat, Re-Animatorand Nemesis as well as being Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal stunt double, stand-in and friend) as the devil and oh wow — “The Russian Nightmare” Nikita Koloff is a biker.
Sheri can also change minds — this doesn’t feel Christian — and get her message on every network. Satan keeps stalking her and her dad, who is now dating her oncologist, which seems a bit unprofessional.
And then — spoilers — at Christmas, when everyone in the world has accepted Jesus, she goes to get her gift and dies in the other room. In Heaven, she finally dances for her mother.
I don’t think that secular creators could make this movie. It’s just too oddly sure of its mission, a film in which a rape is stopped by touching someone in the heart, and then they find their way, as well as that scene where the one naysayer in church has a mental battle with Sheri. It did what faith movies should do. It made me wonder what I’m doing with my life, writing long things about film such as this — to be fair, there’s no other movie like this — instead of trying to save girls with cancer or preach the Good News. We all have our own purpose, and I guess that mine is trying to see as many movies as I can and share that joy.
You can watch this—with the out-of-sync audio and Spanish subtitles—on YouTube.
Todd (LeJohn, President Skullgore on NPRmageddon) has a job interview that starts with a handwritten sign that says, “Take a seat, we’ll be right back,” and continues with an AI, Athena 2.0 (Dawna Lee Heising), conducting the interview. She’s a human resources interface designed to make him more comfortable and to maximize his interview experience.
That means a series of tarot cards that help her to evaluate his mental fitness for employment. We don’t even know what the job is, while Athena 42.0 knows so much about Todd.
Directed by Craig Railsback, who co-wrote it with Dr. Heather Joseph-Witham, this is about how the work for Todd will help him find purpose. He yells back that he’s not an algorithm that needs to be optimized. His answer? Pick three cards.
Instead of learning about the job, Todd is confronted by the pain of his life, the things that he’s lived through, flashbacks that are so intense that they bring him to tears. “The tower burns because its foundation is false,” states the AI.
“The cards are not answers. They are mirrors,” she says, before asking for another card to be revealed. He must learn if he can be redeemed, as long as he dares to reach it. At the end, Todd says, “I know what I want now,” before unplugging the room.
The Job has great lighting that really makes such a small space work for this quick film. The original score and AI special effects are composed by Dr. Renah Wolzinger, and they both contribute to the story, making this a swift and efficient short that both looks and feels good. Even the credits are unique in this, I love how they were animated!
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