Made just before Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho has bikers Brahmin (Steve Oliver), Slick (Thomas Scott) and Rufus (F. Rufus Owens) assaulting women and killing their husbands. Their next victim is Gail Maddox (Holle K. Winters), the wife of veterinarian Cory Maddox (Alex Rocco). As he gets her to the hospital, the gang have already tracked their next victim, Ruby Bonner (Haji, who seriously seems to be some kind of goddess from another planet*), the way too young wife of Harry Bonner (Coleman Francis), who she hates with all her being. They’re both shot and left for dead, but Cory saves her and says he can take her as far as the next town. He wants to kill everyone who dared touch his wife.

There’s an incredible scene where a snake bites Cory and he demands that Ruby suck the poison out. It gets wild, let me tell you. “Suck it!” he keeps yelling. Man, Russ Meyer is anything but subtle.

I imagine that this story is taking place in the same desert as Pussycat! and we’re just lucky that the male bikers never met Varla, Rosie and Billie.

Haji’s real name was Barbarella Catton. Beyond the two Meyer movies mentioned already, she’s also in his movies Good Morning and… Goodbye!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens. She started exotic dancing at the age of 14 and she wrote most of her dialogue in his movies. I’m overjoyed by the fact that she’s also in Demonoid, one of my favorite movies, as well as Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Bigfoot,  and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, using the name Haji Cat. She continued performing in burlesque shows until a year before her death in 2013.

* I have evidence. She told Chris Poggiali, “I’ve always claimed that I’m just a visitor from another place, here to restore energy to my body. My mother was from another galaxy. She brought me here, and we settled in Quebec, but I’ve been here many times before that.”

Extras include commentary by film historian Elizabeth Purchell and filmmaker Zach Clark; interviews with Haji and Alex Rocco and a trailer. Get it from Severin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

As I logged another film in my Letterboxd list, a list that is now approaching 5,000 films, I paused a moment to reflect. I’ve been a film buff all my life, well over 50 years, and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a film on a small budget. Back in the day, even as a pre-teen, I recognized that Hammer Film’s The Gorgon, with my childhood heroes Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, was a good horror film, despite some shaky sets and special effects (hey, look at the wobbly sets and the phony snakes in the Gorgon’s hair!). Unlike haughty film snobs, I’ve always tried to temper my expectations and not dismiss a film simply because the filmmakers had limited resources. With the advent of affordable technology, now anyone can make a film. Most efforts, however, turn out as you’d expect: unwatchable amateur hours, filled with boneheaded dialogue, sub-community-theater acting, badly composed shots with terrible lighting, mismatched edits, and poorly recorded sound. I’ve spent many soul-crushing hours with my eyes glazing over watching things where the only positive comments I could make were that “it’s a film,” though just barely, and congratulate the filmmakers for a successful sale to some streaming service. But once in a while, when folks with brains, talent, and big hearts make a micro-budget film, you get something special. This brings us to Left One Alive, the new film from Columbia, South Carolina filmmaker David Axe. And special it is.

Left One Alive ponders the implications of what happens when horror movies end, particularly those horror movies where the final girl vanquishes the monsters and walks out of the woods into the sunlight just before the final credits roll. Axe’s intelligent screenplay tells us what’s next. Sarah (Cailyn Sam) is the final girl. She has survived after having witnessed the mass slaughter of all her camping friends by weird forest creatures. Until that horrific event, she’d led a normal, mundane life living with her sister in some part of small-town America. We don’t explicitly learn a lot about what that life was like, but economical writing allows us to connect the dots. Then her life changes forever. If you thought for a minute how it would, you’d ask yourself: Will there be post-traumatic stress disorder? Of course. Survivor’s guilt? Yep. A film based on her tragic experience? Sure. The scenes depicting the ridiculous Hollywood version of what happened are hilarious and reminded me of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, a wonderful small film also about some serious existential issues, though with a substantially bigger budget, indie great John Sayles and special-effects legend Douglas Trumball as executive producers, and Sam Elliott in a career-best performance.

These are things that you won’t find in your mine-run horror film, and I was delighted by where this film took me. It doesn’t have a lot of violence, there’s no nudity, and I think I could count on one hand the number of obscenities spoken. It’s a slow, steadily paced, always engaging film, which straddles the line between exploitation and art film, though leaning hard toward the art-film side. While it’s a small film, it’s ambitious. Acting is serviceable or better, with star Cailyn Sam giving a particularly nice performance. Writer/producer/director Axe, abetted by producer/cinematographer/editor Sarah Massey, accomplished what most micro-budget filmmakers only dream of achieving: a film with good cinematography, some modest—yet effective—sound design, and an on-point score. Or as Variety used to say when I read it as a teenager, “Tech credits are pro.” There’s one amazing aerial shot of the forest that was not done with a drone. I’d thought the production, like Herschell Gordon Lewis for 2000 Maniacs over 60 years ago, had secured the use of a bucket truck for a day. That was until I saw behind-the-scenes photos of the plucky Massey in a sling being hoisted high into the air. This can-do spirit forms the film’s DNA and demonstrates what’s possible, even on a budget of $50,000. 

At the end of Left One Alive, the forest creatures referred to in winking fashion by the name of a popular, albeit weird, children’s TV show return to complete Sarah’s character arc. They’re hokey, yet charming, which made me love the film even more. So when the end credits came up, featuring shots from the film done in a style that would feel at home in a $200 million Marvel film, I was left to ponder what happens next. And that, my friends, leads me to tell Axe and company what I hope happens next: they make more films.

Left One Alive is currently streaming on several platforms. 

A young nurse (Kotone Furukawa) goes to visit her grandparents (Masashi Arifuku and Yoshiko Inuyama), who live in the countryside that surrounds the more urban places in Japan, and learns the hard way how they have stayed so jovial into their old age.

Director Yûta Shimotsu’s first movie — this is based on his short film Dreaming to Accept Reality and was produced by Takashi Shimizu (Tomie: Re-birth) — it has sell copy that promises that this “unsettling debut draws from classics like Audition and The Wicker Man to create a wholly unique vision.”

Take this advice anywhere you live: Never go back home. Nothing good happens there. The place where you grew up is much more sinister than how you remember it. Now it is a place of random violence, people asking you to save them and you’ll be trapped in either a ghost story or a J-horror film. Stay where you are. The world is a big enough nightmare without you messing around. You don’t need to find your grandparents oinking like pigs and touching their eyeballs or need to meet the strange beings that are staying inside their home.

I’m used to Japan influencing Western movies, not looking to make Midsommar up north.

The 2025 Overlook Film Festival takes place April 3 to 6. To learn more, click here.

In 1998, the Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon. Since then, it has seen 50,000 visitors every October, even 25 years later. Yet, just like the town in the series of Disney films—Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Halloweentown High and Return to Halloweentown—the locals believe that there are real hauntings. And beyond that, like any small town, there’s plenty of gossip to listen to.

Directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, this film feels like a real-life Waiting for Guffman. A zombie dance is choreographed by a girl who had to drop out of dance and wants to reconnect with her father. A newcomer to the town has bought a favorite restaurant, the Klondike Tavern, and his social media mistake causes his entire staff to mutiny. A woman claims to the town council that she is being attacked in her dreams and that the town is becoming possessed by demons. A team of paranormal investigators is also investigating the hauntings they claim are real.

This film never makes fun of its subjects, instead allowing them to tell their stories. I absolutely loved this and have been raving about it to everyone I can, as it’s a perfect non-spooky way to get yourself ready for the Halloween season. Here’s hoping it finds a streaming home soon so more people can enjoy this fun hangout in a town that has embraced its history as a spooky location.

The 2025 Overlook Film Festival takes place April 3 to 6. To learn more, click here.