How do you know this is from Cleoptra Records? The soundtrack has The 69 Cats, Front Line Assembly, Pink Fairies, Switchblade Symphony, Hawkestrel, Synaesthesia, The Brains, Mike Pinera and Hollywood After Dark on it.

Directed by Mark Polonia and written by Ford Austin and Tyger Torrez, this is set in the familiar woods of Pennsylvania where Polonia has made so many movies, but never one where a New York stockbroker named Jack (Brice Kennedy) gets bitten, the moon gets full and he snorts a whole bag of coke. Actually, the moon doesn’t even matter. It just takes cocaine to make this beast go feral.

There’s also a movie getting made in those woods about an evil clown, but mostly, the actresses (Jamie Morgan and Greta Volkova) are making out with each other. This bit of exploitation follows a girl in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit shooting content for her adult site who gets torn up by the original werewolf. This leads to Jack’s Uber driver getting killed, and we have a movie.

I want all Mark Polonia movies to come out on this label from now on, and I want more goth and rockabilly bands to find their songs in microbudget horror movies. I’m used to these films just showing up on Tubi, so seeing them on Blu-ray makes me overjoyed.

You can get this from MVD.

Directed and written by Lu Chun-ku (Bastard Swordsman), this is about the power struggle between the Fourth Yung Cheng (Tony Leung) and Fourteenth Princes (Mok Siu-Chung) — as the Kangxi Emperor (Ching Miao) is dying — with the Lady Assassin Lui Si Niang (Leanne Lau) caught between them and bodyguard Teng Tsung (Norman Chui) ready to protect the Fourteenth Prince with his life. He just might, as the Fourth Prince has hired the unstoppable Min Geng-Yiu (Jason Pai Piao) to kill everyone in his path.

Yes, there are some parts about how the rulers treat the Han Chinese, but it also has most of the cast battling a Japanese ninja (the director!) and his army of gold ninjas. After you just read about all that palace intrigue, let me assure you that there are throwing stars, wire fighting, sword battles, a giant throwing star and two people cut in half—all in one scene—one up and down and the other left to right.

The title doesn’t come into play until the movie’s last few minutes, but who cares? Let me reiterate: giant throwing star and gold ninjas.

The 88 Films Blu-ray release of The Lady Assassin comes with a set of 4 collector art cards, an interview with Poon Kin-Kwan, a stills gallery, a trailer and a reversible sleeve featuring original art. You can get it from MVD.

Action star Tony Markham (Jeff Rector) is sick of Hollywood and not getting much sleep, thanks to the same dream every night, one where he meets dinosaurs and sees a cavegirl named Hea-Thor (Denise Ames) that he believes he’s destined to be with.

If you look at the cover of this, you may think you’re getting a sex comedy with dinosaurs. Then you see that it was directed, written and produced by Donald Glut and realize that this is something special. This is the kind of movie that mixes well-done stop-motion dinosaurs with bare breasts and lots of them, sure. But it also has Karen Black make a cameo, as well as Forrest J. Ackerman, William Marshall as a paleontologist and Donna Spangler. And Ed Fury from peplum like Ursus as Ur-So? My cup — and many of the cup sizes in this — runneth over.

Actually, this is both Marshall and Fury’s last film.

Man, Donald Glut. His website just makes me smile, as it’s all somewhat attractive women holding up his books for the bibliography. It feels like he got to puberty and decided that he’d never stop loving seeing women topless or dinosaurs attacking cavemen. And who are we to tell him that he’s wrong? I mean, male gaze and all that, but clearly he loves women as much as a good fart joke. I also think he added the IMDB facts, like this one: “Unlike past Hollywood stereotypes, he didn’t want any of the cavewomen in the film to scream when they see dinosaurs. He wanted the actresses to be sexy and feminine at all times, so they never lose what guys perceive as femininity, but still be tough and handle their own. He felt that would enhance their overall appeal. He said, “I made a conscious effort that they would not, as in many other prehistoric-type movies over the years, come off looking like strippers or hookers.””

A lot of times, you may wonder, “Is this an exploitation movie?” when you watch something. For this, they shot a clothed and unclothed version. There’s your answer. This is an exploitation movie. And one way after anyone couldn’t see half-naked cavewomen, so it was obviously a labor of love. In short, I’m proud to have it in my collection, but maybe my wife would shake her head at me if she knew it was there.

Extras on the Visual Vengeance Blu-ray release — the first Blu-ray ever of this movie — include:

• Limited Edition slipcase by Rick Melton and Dinosaur Valley Girls logo sticker
• Remastered SD master from original tape elements
• New 2023 commentary and an archival commentary with director Don Glut and C. Courtney Joyner
• Dinosaur Valley Guy: interview with director Don Glut
• Don Glut: The Collection – A look inside Don’s legendary dinosaur home museum
• The Making of Dinosaur Valley Girls
• PG-13 cut
• Deleted and alternate scenes
• Actress auditions reel
• Dinosaur Tracks, Jurassic Punk and Dinosaur Valley Girls music videos
• Original storyboards
• Production image galleries
• Mu Wang in Mu-Seum and Danse Prehistoric
• Original promotional trailer
• Visual Vengeance trailers
• Reversible sleeve featuring original home video art
• 2-sided insert with alternate art
• Folded mini-poster
• “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set

You can get this from MVD.

Simon (Simon Rhee) wants to know why his sister was killed. This brings him into a war of fists and feet with Master Chan (Phillip Rhee), a sorcerer who has been after the ancient amulet shared by Simon and his sibling  (Arlene Montano).

This is a very simple opening paragraph that doesn’t hint at how absolutely insane this movie is. Shot in six days with no script — “Filmed Entirely on Location in Southern California” — this was directed and written by Tim Everitt and Tom Sartori, who made it with exactly thirty grand. It was probably the best money spent ever.

If you saw the cover art for this, you may expect your everyday kung fu movie. You would not be prepared for magic users who shoot chickens out of their hands. Or aliens. Or flying martial arts. Or a band resembling Devo, the clone army that fuels the evil empire. Or Susanna Hoffs (maybe, supposedly).

Simon and Phillip Rhee went on to appear in many fight scenes, but here, they had all the freedom to do whatever they wanted. They also brought their students on to punch and kick one another for less than a week. They’re not just guys off the streets. These are trained professionals ready to elevate the fight scenes in this to art, even if the budget is less than almost any movie you can find.

This is the kind of movie that has talking dogs and chickens and it’s nearly an afterthought because there’s also a fire-breathing dragon. Most movies would be satisfied with one of these things and have all the money to fully realize all of these many moments, but Furious doesn’t care. I wish that more filmmakers today didn’t care this much, that they would use the cameras in their phones and all the technology at their disposal and make something 5% as cool as this, because this is 200% better than any fighting movie you’ll watch in 4 years. Don’t make me do math.

The Visual Vengeance release is perfect, and I’m in awe of the extras Justin Decloux created for it. He’s sent me down a rabbit hole filled with American chop sockery, and for that, I can only say thank you.

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

You can get this from MVD.

Shout out to Ator Moonbeam. He realized that I was missing this Jess Franco movie and sent me his DVD in the mail. Now, it closes out the second Jess Franctuary.

Maria Beltran (Rachel Sheppard) has become famous for writing Desperate Letters, a book that exposed her corrupt Caribbean homeland of San Hermoso. For some reason, she thinks that it would be a good idea to come home for a book tour despite getting death threats. While there, she meets up with several old lovers, including Beatriz Arenas (Tatiana Cohen), who she has a sapphic encounter with while a hidden camera records things, which the secret police use to blackmail her into doing assassinations for her, in-between Tora (Lina Romay) threatening her with sodomy with a curling iron and showing her the eyeball of her female lover.

Luckily, she has an ex-CIA ex-boyfriend named Leonardo Radek (Roger Pavlovich) who shows up and does capoeira and ninja stuff, killing people primarily by breaking their necks. Was I sad when he breaks Lina’s neck? You know it.

This film also led to Antena Criminal: Making a Jess Franco Movie, which showed what it takes to go to a hotel near the beach and allow Jess Franco to make a political thriller with surf rock, extended travelogue footage, zooms, extraneous lesbian scenes that are essential to the plot because they’re in a Jess Franco movie, dubbing which barely qualifies as the word, more zooms, Lina Romay being deranged and Linnea Quigley showing up just long enough to be top credited on the cover of the DVD yet meaning nothing to the actual film.

This was Franco’s 176th movie and I assume that when the hotel staff was on lunch break, he snuck into a conference room and pushed his zoom lens as far as it would go, filming several women with glitter all over their pubes.

This has some of the wildest—and by that, I mean borderline inept—action scenes in a Franco film, but it is missing things like diamonds, Dr. Orloff and Lina being more featured. In my dreams, this movie was mostly her and Linnea Quigley in a hotel room for three hours, smoking cigarettes while they discuss politics and Jess just goes wild with his camera. I don’t want AI to make movies, but I will accept my computer overlords if it can make that for me.

We live in a world that hasn’t seen a Friday the 13th movie since 2009, but films like Terrifier 3 have become big box office. People are hungry for slashers — they always have been — and if they’re not getting Jason Vorhees, they’re going to look for something new. Maybe Heart Eyes will be the answer.

Directed by Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within) and written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon (Disturbia, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones) and Michael Kennedy (Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife), this is about a serial killer who shows up in a random town every Valentine’s Day and starts to kill couples. Whoever it is, Heart Eyes is now in Seattle, starting his murders at a spa and a winery. These murders end up nearly costing ad exec Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) her job, as her new ad is all about couples dying. Her boss Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins) brings in Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding, Cuba’s son) to try to develop a new ad quickly; meanwhile, Heart Eyes is killing through Jet City and doesn’t realize that Ally and Jay aren’t an item.

What if Jay was in the same towns at the same time as Heart Eyes? What if a ring with his initials shows up at a crime scene? What if he gets arrested by detectives Zeke Hobbs (Devon Sawa) and Jeanine Shaw (Jordana Brewster), then handcuffed in the police station when Heart Eyes pays a visit? And what if this mixed a romantic comedy with a slasher that wasn’t afraid to get gory?

Heart Eyes reminds me of post-Scream 90s slashers like Valentine and Urban Legend. I say that as a positive. The killer’s look —designed by Tony Gardner, who also made the masks for Freaky, Happy Death Day and Totally Killer—feels giallo. I wish they lit the neon eyes more because that’s such an interesting image.

No slasher today can equal the glory years of 1978-1981, but Heart Eyes makes an effort. It feels like the candy you eat on the holiday, a whole Whitman’s Sampler that may not fill you up, but you don’t dislike the experience. It certainly has the actual stalk and slash moments that many modern films miss and a couple you want to see survive. That’s way better than we’ve been getting.

Madame (Sean Young) has left Darling (Lauren Ashley Carter) alone in a vast New York City building where she’ll be the caretaker. As you expect with possession movies, she’s told to never enter one closed room. She also finds an upside-down cross, and the last girl in her position threw herself off the balcony as if she were Holly flinging herself into the void at a birthday party.

Soon, Darling is seeing visions and crawls out onto the balcony herself, where she finds the words “Abyssus abyssum invocat,” which means “the deep calls to the deep.” A man Darling saw earlier, who recognized her as he picked up her new necklace, follows her home and explains how a ritual in the house once conjured a demon. She stabs him, claiming that Henry Sullivan must be punished.

By the end, Darling has confessed to Madame, “I think I’ll become one of your ghost stories now.” She also jumps off the balcony and the cycle repeats.

Shot in monochromatic grays, this feels like Polanski — Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Repulsion — yet never feels like a slave to those inspirations. That said, I’ve been reading lots of reviews that hated this. It hit right for me, all black mascara and freakouts, a perfect thing to watch in the middle of a gray and rainy Pittsburgh day.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Noah Hazard (Dimitri “Vegas” Thivaios) may love his girlfriend Lea (Jennifer Heylen) and their daughter Zita (Mila Rooms), but the true love of his life is his gold Lexus. However, he soon puts everyone in danger by helping his cousin Carlos (Jeroen Perceval) pick up Kludde (Frank Lammers) from prison and immediately go on a run to steal drugs.

Somehow this leads to a man having sex with Noah’s car, a criminal kidnapping his daughter, crazy stunts through the streets of Antwerp, this never leaves the inside of the car, which you would think limits the film, but thanks to animation and just plain strangeness, you never feel trapped.

Directed by Jonas Govaerts (Cub) and written by Trent Haaga (68 Kill), this is an example of a Tubi Original that moves to the top of the heap. If this is what it takes to get experimental foreign films to America, so be it, because I have no idea where else Hazard would fit in. It’s well-shot, the soundtrack is amazing — Thivaois is a DJ — and even has a strong message by the close. It’s in a world that is our own but not quite; it’s like a video game come to life.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Why is this Amityville movie better than almost all of the other cash-in films? SRS has put out so many of these, but not one directed by Matt Jaissle, the director of The Necro Files. So while this has all of the things you expect from an Amityville movie — scenes shot on camera phones and edited in to appear that actors are all in the same place, lots of Zoom calls, people screaming at the screen — it’s also strange enough that it keeps you engaged.

Stuart Birdsall (William Childress) has moved into a new house in Amityville, which he feels is the perfect place to experiment with VIC 3000, an AI program he invented.  I have to share the sell copy for this, because I love the capitalized parts: “The only problem is that the house is possessed, and now so is his PROGRAM. What began as a technology designed to make our lives easier has transformed into a SATANIC FORCE Hell-bent on making our deaths GHASTLIER.”

Have you ever wondered, “How do those people appear disconnected from the movie and seem to be in it?” That’s an IndieGoGo perk. When will I pay the money to be in one of these? Do you think Becca would stay with me if I spent money on that?

This has a possessed sex bot (Laura Reyes), a chubby longhaired and bearded hero — am I triggered? — who can do a roll under a garage door and has an attractive wife (Laura Schubring) yet all he does is yell on Zoom calls. I mean, did they film me down here in my horror basement? This also ends abruptly because there’s a sequel, Amityville VR. Yes, I will watch that.

If you haven’t watched 62 Amityville movies like I have—check out the Letterboxd list—you may watch this and think it’s horrible. But for those who have been through microbudget horror and keep watching these Amityville films, you will see the magic that this has and the others lack. I do wish the flying baby from The Necro Files was in it. That said, I want to say that it was in every movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.