Produced by Taiwaan’s Tong Hsing Company Limited in 1976, this movie is based on the 1974 tokusatsu film Kamen Rider X, taking most of its footage from Five Riders vs. Kingdark and the earthquake from Godzilla vs. Megalon. It was re-released twenty years later in Taiwan, as well as many other countries, in this bootleg form.

Emperor Chi-Wu (King Dark), the leader of the Demon & God Organization, is the bad guy. And with a company name like that, he kind of has to be, right? It’s just moving around the Japanese name of the bad guys, GOD (Government of Darkness). His final form was taken from a stage show costume of another final boss, Great General of Darkness from Great Mazinger.

This is a Kamen Rider movie and I feel like me going too deep into its mythos will result in tokusatsu fans feeling like I do when I read uninformed giallo articles. But what I do know that is instead of Kamen Rider (Masked Rider, if you watched Fox in the 90s and 2000s), you get Super Rider X and four of his friends, including a never-before female Kamen. Or Super Rider. Or Masked Rider. This is a lot of Kamen Rider X and even has Riderman show up, who was dead. He got better.

This does, however, answer a thing I always wondered. What if Darth Vader — I know, this predates Star Wars — was super Satanic and also had fashion leanings toward both the samurai and a peplum movie? Also: What if he could turn into a gigantic demon and fought motocross dudes? And what if there was a monster called Franken Bat which is exactly what it sounds like, a Frankenstein’s Monster, painted silver, with bat wings, and he carries around beakers filled with the blood of young women that he drinks when he needs energy? Could all the mythological monsters show up, too? And what about the god Pan, who is now a monster by the name of Pannic, who has missile horns?

I have no idea what I watched but I loved it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

“Here in this face lies the key to your death

Touch it, see it

Here in this fist is the means to your end

Touch it, feel it

GREEN HELL!

You’ve come to this as no one could

I’ll bet you never knew you would

And don’t you run away from it I’ll bet you thought you really could

We’re gonna burn it up, it up

Like deviled hell but not afraid it up, it up

Time to face the facts of death it up, it up

Feel the ground to feel the searing up, it up

Your old world starts to shake apart it up, it up

Down upon your belly you must stay, get up

Get up and feel the torch of hell get up, get up

Hell is green and in it’s flames it up, it up

We’re gonna burn it up

GREEN HELL!”

Yet another movie I watched because of The Misfits.

Green Hell is an area of Africa where Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis) and Dan Morgan (Robert Griffith) have acted like dumb Cold War scientists and shot wasps into space, only to have them land in the jungle, get huge and start killing people, as Dr. Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his daughter Lorna (Barbara Turner, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s mother) soon learn.

Why do old man scientists always take their daughters to the jungle?

After the death of Lorentz from a giant stinger, the guides Mahri (Eduardo Ciannelli) and Arobi (Joel Fluellen) take the team into Green Hell, which also has an active volcano. To stop them, as all American scientists usually do, they’ve brought bombs to blow them up real good.

Let me restate: This is all their fault and now they’re throwing bombs at a volcano, which just makes the wasps — which have killed so many people — even more enraged.

The volcano erupts and kills the wasps, which has Morgan exclaim, “Nature has a way of destroying its mistakes.”

You were the mistake! It was your fault! The wasps didn’t ask to get made huge!

In 1964, Remco made the Hamilton’s Invaders line of toys. These giant bug movies were big on TV, so they just made non-copyright friendly versions of all of them with Horrible Hamilton being the wasp from this movie. There was even a set that came with a volcano. Some of the monsters from this set ended up becoming a part of Remco’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea toy line, as these guys were big on recycling.

Speaking of recycling, some believe that this movie is 40% stock footage. Most of it comes from the 1939 movie Stanley and Livingstone, which is why Jim Davis wears the same costume as Spencer Tracy, but if you look at the gun he carries, it’s different.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As a kid, we only had Godzilla King of the Monsters! and as far as we knew, that was the definitive edition. We didn’t know that there was the Japanese original cut, the Luigi Cozzi-made Cozzilla or this French edition, which combines the American and Japanese cuts and dubs it all into French.

Made by Les Films du Verseau, this is a balancing act, as the Japanese version has so much terror missing from the safer American cut. What emerges as a little of each and in a world where we can choose to watch either the one we grew up with or the one true version, if you’re not viewing this as a curiosity or to test how much French you know, I’m not sure why you’re watching it. Being a completist? Doing a 24-hour marathon of giant monster movies?

I love that it exists, however, because it’s just another way to experience something that I love.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

As a small, fat and large glasses-wearing child, I was obsessed with Ultraman to the point that if I ever saw any Japanese tourists on vacation, I would try to leave with them instead of my family in the hope that they would bring me east and all I would have to do is watch monster TV shows and never have to go to school.

I’m 52 now and I want the same.

Anyways, Mirrorman was made in the wake of Ultraman except that it has the king of all kaiju movies, Ishirō Honda, directing it. Its also Tsuburaya Productions’ — the home of Ultraman — first non-Ultra show and was pretty dark for the first 26 episodes before the TV network said to make it for kids.

Set in the far future of the 1980s, this has the Invaders coming to Earth with all of their evil kaiju. The leader of the Science Guard Members, Professor Mitarai, has a foster son named Kyotaro Kagami, whose last name means mirror. He has a secret, that his father was an alien and his mother was human. His father may be dead after a fight with King Zyger , but his mom has been taken by the alien monsters. To top all that off, he is actually the son of a superhero with has the same powers and is known as Mirrorman. He doesn’t want to be Mirrorman — come on, dude — but when he stands in front of a reflective surface, holds up his pendant and says, “mirror spark” he gets his powers.

This short was released in Japan on March 12, 1972, where it was distributed by Toho as part of the Spring 1972 Toho Champion Festival along with Godzilla vs. Gigan, Pinocchio: The Series, Hutch the Honeybee: Hold Me, Momma and The Genius Bakabon: Night Duty is Scary.

After episode 26, this became more like Ultraman, as Mirrorman would have a bomb put in his heart by the Invaders that will kill him if he uses his powers for too long. Why didn’t they just kill him? Unlike so many robot heroes, he actually lives at the end of his series, as his father also survived and they go to the second dimension to fight the Invaders.

In 2010’s Ultraman Zero The Movie: Super Deciding Fight! The Belial Galactic Empire, Mirror Knight is Mirrorman. Well, inspired by him.

The kaiju in the first episode, The Iron, has a hug attack and a tail that seems a lot like an evil penis. Young me would never have consider this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Based on Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story, directed by Eugène Lourié and with animation by Ray Harryhausen, this is a very Godzilla-style movie — actually, it’;s the other way around as Godzilla came out a year later — as a giant dinosaur known as the Rhedosaurus in unfrozen by an atomic bomb test. What really inspired this was the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong.

As Operation Experiment — these dumb scientists — blows up a big part of the Arctic, physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian) states, “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell.” Time doesn’t take all that long, as there’s soon as the dinosaur shows up. In the story, it was a brontosaurus, but not it’s a four-legged tyrannosaurus, which never existed except as a stop motion monster. Everyone thinks Nesbitt has lost his marbles when he says he saw the dinosaur, but soon its making its way through America, destroying everything.

Soon, there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, damage estimates $300 million as the Rhedosaurus makes its way to Coney Island, before Colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) shoots it in the throat with a bazooka. The blood from it causes a virus that causes even more people to die and the beast goes into the water, only to reemerge in the amusement park, where Lee Van Cleef of all people shows up and has a radiation gun that he uses to shoot the dinosaur in its neck wound. As all military operations usually end, the entire Coney Island park burns to the ground.

There are some famous people in here, if just their voices. Beyond James Best as a radar man, the tones of Bill Woodson (who did The Odd Couple credits) and Merv Griffith are in this. As for the skeleton that is used, that wasn’t made for this. It was from RKO’s prop department and first showed up in Bringing Up Baby. As for the Rhedosaurus, he’s the dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

One of the most successful movies of 1953, this would lead the way for every kaiju that would come in its wake. It was released in Japan by Daiei, who would soon have their own giant monster with Gamera.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The inspiration for these annual day long posts of kaiju films come from my childhood and WOR-TV in New York. Every Turkey Day, it would air after King Kong and Son of Kong, making you feel better after the depression of that second movie, until 1985, when RKO General sold Channel 9 to MCA Inc.

I did some reality checking with Wikipedia and learned this: “These WOR-TV Thanksgiving programs started on Thanksgiving Day 1976. On this occasion, Channel 9 broadcast Mighty Joe Young (at 1 p.m.), King Kong vs. Godzilla (at 3 p.m.), and Son of Kong (at 5 p.m.). In the years that followed, WOR broadcast Mighty Joe Young (at 1:00), King Kong (at 3:00), and Son of Kong(at 5:00) in 1977, Mighty Joe Young (at 12:30), King Kong (at 2:30), and Son of Kong (at 4:30) from 1978 to 1980, Mighty Joe Young (at 1:00), King Kong (at 2:45), and Son of Kong (at 4:45) in 1981, King Kong (at 1:00), Son of Kong (at 3:00), and Mighty Joe Young (at 4:15) from 1982 to 1984, and King Kong (at 1:00) and Mighty Joe Young (at 3:00) in 1985.”

The further inspiration for these posts comes from the second part of the day: “The ratings of the 1976 Thanksgiving marathon were good enough for WOR-TV to include the day after Thanksgiving (Friday) into the monster movie line up. Over the next few years the same movies were aired on Thanksgiving Day, but the movies broadcast the day after changed. Several times the movies Godzilla vs The Cosmic Monster, Son of Godzilla, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and Godzilla vs. Megalon were aired on that day.”

This movie was produced by Arko, a company formed just to make the film, a union of RKO and Argosy Pictures, which was John Ford and Merian C. Cooper. Ernest Schoedsack and Willis O’Brien contributed to the storyline while Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose, wrote the screenplay. It was intended to be a more lighthearted version of King Kong, as it was made by many of the same filmmakers, aided by around ten animators working for fourteen months, along with Ray Harryhausen working on his first movie.

When living in Tanganyika in Africa, seven-year-old Jill Young (Terry Young) adopts a baby gorilla that she names Joe. Ten years later, Max O’Hara (Robert Armstrong) and a cowboy named Gregg (Ben Johnson) find him and want to bring him to America to be a performer, because that always works out so well. Jill needs money to maintain her father’s home, so she agrees. She may also kind of be into Gregg, so that helps.

In Hollywood, Jill plays “Beautiful Dreamer” on the piano while Joe lifts her and outboxes Primo Carnera, who was also a pro wrestler. Joe gets homesick while Jill and Gregg fall in love. Some drunks give him whiskey and then set his hand on fire. He reacts as you’d expect, destroying everything he can. The authorities want to execute Joe, who everyone helps escape, only to find a burning orphanage that Joe and Gregg work together to save. He’s allowed to go home, where they send Max a video of the ranch and the happy — and surviving — Joe.

This had a huge advertising campaign, with 11,000 postcards being mailed by Joe to people — I wish I had one! — and someone dressed as him appearing in several parades. It didn’t help — the movie didn’t perform as well as the films it was inspired by — but it did become part of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood in the character of Gonga the Gorilla and Enoch Emery going to see a movie in which an orangutan rescues children from a burning orphanage.

It did win the first Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and there was almost a sequel, Mighty Joe Young Meets Tarzan. I would have gone crazy over that as a kid. While it doesn’t have the horror at the heart of the first two RKO ape movies, there are some wonderful memories associated with this film.

Dr. Frank Demonico (Mark C. Fullhardt) was a couples therapist in Amityville who may have killed several of the couples that he was supposedly helping.

So yes, this is a sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving and even has an opening with so many talking heads — and yes, one TV report — where various crowdfunded people get to read lines of exposition.

Directed by Will Collazo Jr. and Julie Anne Prescott, who wrote the script with David Rodriguez, this moves into a director named Rocco (Michael Ruggiere) pitching his latest movie to studio boss Ivy (Erica Dyer). He wants to make a movie called The Amityville Cannibal Thanksgiving about Demonico and make it in Amityville.

Yet as the crew starts to film, they’re killed one by one by a foul — fowl, ugh — mouthed turkey who is working with a groundskeeper named Bram (Dino Castelli). Yes, this is not just a fake Amityville, but it’s also Thankskilling without the budget.

As for the killer turkey, he’s Frank Jr. (Steven Kiseleski) and he’s not above using a chainsaw to murder his victims. I liked him, even if he sounds mid-poop in every line of dialogue that he says.

This is the sixty-first Amityville movie that I’ve watched. That says some horrible things about me, when you think about it, because at an average of 90 minutes each, I have spent 3.91 days of my life on these movies, not even to mention the time that I wrote about them, appeared on podcasts and talked to others about them.

This one attempts to be both a meta behind the scenes of independent filmmaking while also, again, being Thankskilling. There also seems to be lights strobing in almost every bar scenes, as if the cops pulled the entire bar over. Speaking of excrement making, every time Rocco appears on screen, he’s making mid-loaf pinching faces. Even when doing coke, which he leaves on the bar. I’m not telling you how to be a drug addict, Rocco, but take your drugs with you.

I love that indie movies just have so many swear words in them. It makes them seem so realistic, especially when rubber turkeys come to life and chainsaw people to death.

At 42 minutes in, I decided to look at how much time was left, sure that this was nearly over. No, I am not even at the halfway point. I have entered the singularity, the point where matter is theoretically compressed to infinite density. Here, the laws of physics break down as I enter the final destination for everything that survives past the event horizon of a black hole. I feel like I am watching the Star Child from 2001 while at once being the Star Child, aware and not aware of what is happening. Is this movie still a swear-filled ode to making a bad movie or has it become one? Why are some rooms lit as if Mario Bava is coming over for a beer? Why is there a groundskeeper like The Shining? Why does the groundskeeper sound like a mob guy? Can my thoughts escape past the infinitely tiny point I have found myself within, as all known conceptions of time and space completely end?

“Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on around here?” Ivy yells at one point. This is before more of the cast and crew are killed, then Frank Jr. ties a woman up and attempts to have sex with her as she tells him that she can’t feel anything and his father must have never explained to him how to pleasure a woman properly.

The credits? They are over ten minutes long.

You can get this from SRS or watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

This is directed by Jay Woelfel, who has made a ton of movies, but perhaps is best known for Beyond Dreams Door.

In his director’s notes for this, he said: “Asylum of Darkness originally came about directly from the release of my first feature film, Beyond Dreams Door, made in my hometown of Columbus Ohio and released in 1989. The sales reps for that film claimed to want to make other films with the team that had made that film. So I embarked on a journey of writing long treatments for film after film for them, I think six at least. One of these was/is Asylum of Darkness . They, the sales reps, liked the elements in Beyond Dreams Door that questioned what was real and what wasn’t. They encouraged me to do something like that again saying “that is what you do best.” So I wrote a 30 page treatment, not about Dream reality, but in this case Insane Reality. A main character who is insane and knows that most of what he sees is insane. A key element to this premise being that, what he doesn’t know, is that insane people actually see beyond what we would call daily reality. Only they can see into a supernatural insane reality of shapeshifting demons that move behind the scenes of a sane person’s view of life. I liked the faceless “ghosts” that appear in Japanese ghost stories and those would be our main character’s chief rivals. The reps said that in the treatment, they couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. That was my whole point.”

Shot on 35mm, starring the same star from Beyond Dreams Door — Nick Baldasare — and having a plot that has so many twists and turns that it packs ten movies into its two plus hours, if this came out from Neon or A24, people would be obsessively masturbating over it to the point that you’d wonder how a movie could be that good. But no, this is a movie made by someone they’ve never heard of, hiding in the mom and pop video store that is Tubi, collecting virtual dust while lunatics like you and me are about to obsessively masturbate over it.

Or maybe you’ll feel like this reviewer, who said, “…one of the most schizophrenic films I have ever seen. Everything about it, from the acting to the directing to the music and everything in between, feels like everyone involved kept changing their minds every other day about what kind of movie they wanted to make.”

Dwight (Baldasare) is trapped in a mental institution as he’s committed murder but his lawyers got him a not guilty by means of insanity plea. There, he becomes friends with Van Gogh (Frank Jones Jr.), a man who removes his eye when he sees something that he can’t handle, and is treated by Dr. Shaker (Richard Hatch), who sometimes appears to be a skeleton. He escapes, running across the road and causing a crash that causes his spirit to cross over with a rich man named Artimus Finch.

He soon falls in love with that man’s abused wife Ellen (Amanda Howell) and takes over his life, taking on the vices and behaviors of someone who he wasn’t born as while Finch dies inside Dwight’s body. There’s also Detective Kesler (Tim Thomerson), who he may or may not have hired to find out what is going on.

You can add might or might not to everything in this movie, as characters change motivations, friends become enemies, enemies become friends and it gets a lot Lost Highway and I say that not because this is indebted to that film but because I have no other handle to hang this on, a film that juxtaposes its lead character being devoured by a zombie while Tiffany Shepis is all flirty with him as she’s dressed for a funeral. And who is Shepis, the woman who visits him every day while he’s losing his mind in the hospital? Who is good? Who is bad? Is anyone?

Originally released in 2012 as Season of Darkness before being revised in 2017 as Asylum of Darkness, this was shot in Ohio and edited in Los Angeles. It feels like it came from the 1990s, where you would have found it two minutes before the video store closed and then tried to tell all your friends about it but couldn’t find a copy anywhere to prove that it was real. I feel the same way now as I’m watching it online, so that should give you an idea of just how singular this is.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

I’m ten minutes into this movie and I’ve already met the cybernetic Dr. Christopher Steele (Randal Malone), a krimi looking robot supervillain; giant rats attacking a spaceship; a rat worm its way into the crotch of heroine Sonia (Tasha Tacosa) and artillery being loaded out of a Space Steele Corporation AC-130 to blow a rocket out of the sky. Needless to say, I’m in love with this and it hasn’t even got started yet.

Jeff Leroy makes movies that feel like they were drawn in Spanish class by a bored 16 year old instead of paying attention. I’m talking stuff like Frankenstein in a Women’s Prison, Furious Road and Giantess Attack vs. Mecha Fembot.

Now, this movie is obviously made with miniatures and no budget — and all the CGI quality that implies — but it’s heart is worth a million blockbusters. I mean, this movie has a mysterious planet just showing up in our solar system and a woman being controlled by a super smart psychic rat that lives where her guts used to be. And this movie is in no way afraid of showing you just how disgusting that would be.

Why does Dr. Steele look like he does and have metal hands? “Probably a rocket explosion. Need to know basis.” This is how you do dialogue. Of course Sonia’s ex is Jake Walsh (Ford Austin), an ex-Special Forces guy who is willing to hide her even if she is bringing rats to destroy our world.

Speaking of giant rats, there was nearly a kaiju movie in the 60s that would have changed the scope of the genre. Giant Horde Beast Nezura was a movie that was directed by Mitsuo Murayama and produced by Daiei Film, but it was shut down by the health department because the brown rats being used for the rat swarm could transmit diseases. Daiei wasn’t put off making kaiju films and soon made Gamera.

Somehow, this movie combines Starship Troopers, Aliens, Rats: Night of Terror and every 1950s science gone wild movie along with special effects that go from “how did they do that?” to “that’s obviously a rat from PetSmart with CGI red eyes.” It also remembers that gore is so essential, so why not have a woman eat a man’s throat while blood sprays like the geyser of a Japanese samurai movie?

This is the kind of movie that demands to be watched with an audience, as it has stuff in it like a rat temple on Planet X; a Phantom of the Opera-like scene where we see Professor Steele’s face, Sonia shooting herself in the head and the rats refusing to let her die, so she wears a hat to cover the whole in her head; a drunk named Teddy exposing the rat in her head that uses its psychic powers to blow him into chunks; Jake cutting himself to feed her blood and that scene being shot as if its sexy and, of course, giant rats taking over most of America.

This ends on a cliffhanger and man, I wish Jeff Leroy made ten of these.