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.

Directed by Natalie Erika James from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White and Skylar James, Apartment 7A has the roughest of battles to fight. Do we need a prequel to what may be the most perfect horror movie ever, Rosemary’s Baby? We’ve had a TV movie sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby and a 2014 miniseries remake. What does this have to bring to the table?

In my eyes, a lot.

After their 2010 A Nightmare On Elm Street was a critical failure, Platinum Dunes stopped making remakes and reimaginings for some time, other than restarting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films. Since the success of their A Quiet Place and The Purge movies, they’ve embraced sequels and films set within the universe of their properties.

Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) was just a short conversation and a death in the original, but here she’s a dancer who will seemingly do anything to be on Broadway, getting to be in Kiss Me, Kate before horribly breaking her ankle, an injury that she deals with via pills and determination. On another failed audition, she follows producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) home, becomes sick and is helped by Roman (Kevin McNally) and Minnie Castavet (Dianne Wiest). Over the next few days, she has a bad dream and wakes up on bed with Marchand, who tells her she got the part. Another nightmare leads to a neighbor named Lily giving her a salve that fixes her ankle, just days before Lily attacks her with scissors.

The Bramford is, as always, a strange place.

As you’d imagine, she’s soon pregnant and has the Castavets taking a special interest in her. Dr. Sapirstein seems too strange; a back alley abortion leads to the doctor having a seizure, you see where this is all going.

You’ve seen this part before. A party, where 1965 will be year one and God dies; Satan will be born. Except that — spoilers here — Terry dances to “Be My Baby” and sort of like The Pyx — exactly like? — she throws herself out the window, ending the child’s life before it can happen.

There’s a lot of fan service, but I think my wife may be the one person getting it all, like Minnie drinking a vodka blush or the Woodhouses walking through the police tape when the film ends. But after years of Blumhouse remakes angering her with how they play with the culture that she loves, she was wildly pleased with this film. Compared to the recent ‘Salem’s Lot, this feels practically worshipful. Wiest is great in her role.

Yes, we didn’t need a prequel to this film. But as I always say, when done well — or even just OK — films like this give us what we want most of all, more time in the worlds of the movies that we love the most.

Congo will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.

Frank Marshall is more known as a producer than a director. After all, he was in that role for movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, Back to the Future and so many more films, but he didn’t direct until 1990’s Arachnophobia. He also helmed Alive and Eight Below, as well as this film. Again — he’s much better known as a producer, as he’s since executive produced the Jason Bourne and Jurassic Park films.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, a Michael Crichton novel also inspired this film, which had a long history before it finally played cinemas.

After the success of The First Great Train Robbery, Crichton wanted to write a movie for Sean Connery, as the character of Charles Munro, who he saw as an analog to Allan Quatermain. Ironically, that’s the character that Connery would play in his final screen role in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Crichton pitched the idea to producer Frank Yablans — the same guy who brought us The Fury, Mommie Dearest and Kidco — who liked the idea so much that he — without Crichton’s authorization thank you very much — sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, a year before the book was published.

Once Crichton learned that he could not use a real gorilla to portray the character of Amy, he left the project. The film was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter before years later, Marshall came on board. That all came to pass because, during the making of Jurassic Park, Crichton was impressed with Stan Winston’s work. Producer Kathleen Kennedy suggested that Winston could make the apes for Congo, talked to her husband — yep, Frank Marshall — about the project and Yablans came back on board again.

However, the final film is only loosely based on the Crichton script, with John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) taking over the writing duties.

While testing a communications laser in the Congo, TraviCom employees Charles Travis (Bruce Campbell!) and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city. However, it looks like everyone dies as the company watches the exploration via satellite by Karen Ross (Laura Linney), a former CIA operative and also the former fiancee of Travis, whose dad R.B. (Joe Don Baker!) owns the company. Man, talk about run-on sentences.

There’s also primatologist Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), who has a mountain gorilla named Amy, who can speak via a special glove that translates sign language to audio. She’s been drawing jungles and intricate gems, which means that Peter thinks she should go back home to Africa. He funds that trip via Karen and TraviCom, as well as Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).

They’re led by the greatest hunter of all time, Captain Monroe Kelly. You know what they always say: if you can’t get Sean Connery, get Ernie Hudson. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — Killer Kroc from Suicide Squad — shows up as Munro’s second-in-command Kahega. And hey — there’s Joe Pantoliano as another merc! And John Hawkes (Eastbound & Down) is also here, as well as Delroy Lindo and Kevin Grevioux from the Underworld movies.

Between native tribes, gorillas being used to guard diamond mines and Tim Curry getting killed by a pack of those gorillas — not to mention a subplot that has Dr. Elliot upset when Amy ends up getting rawdogged (rawaped?) by a silverback and leaving humanity for the jungle, this movie literally looks like studio notes on film. There’s everything for somebody, I guess. Curry and Hudson are having a blast, however. Hudson is almost in a totally different movie than anyone else and has called out Congo as the best time he ever had making a movie. It shows.

1990’s kids had Kenner on hand to help them recreate the story of the Lost City of Zinj with Congo action figures. You could grab Peter, Karen, Kahega, Peter and Amy for the good guys — well, I guess protagonists, maybe, but who wants to tell kids that they are protagonists versus good guys? And then for the apes, you have Blastface, Mangler, Zinj Apes and the deluxe Bonecrusher. There were also two vehicles, the Net Trap and Trail Hacker. They fit into the Kenner aesthetic, just like their RoboCop and Jurassic Park figures. Seriously, Kenner made figures for every movie it seemed like — they made Waterworld figures, after all!

Speaking of Jurassic Park, my feeling on this movie has been that everyone wanted to will another series of films much like Crichton’s novel into existence. This whole thing was vaporware, based on a story that the author never really finished made by people who didn’t have any real concern with the source material, which never really existed in the first place. Millions were dumped into it and it actually did pretty well — $152 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — but no one really remembers it.

All they do remember is that there was a scene where one of the Zinj gorillas uses a laser. That scene doesn’t exist in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering it in a Mandela Effect moment.

Blood Tracks will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.

Imagine The Hills Have Eyes, but in a skiing lodge, with a hair metal band.

It stars Easy Action, the first Swedish band to ever get a worldwide record deal, which is a fact on their Wikipedia page that kind of smells fishy. Abba?

The band split up in 1986, a year after this effort, when guitarist and band leader Kee Marcello quit the band to join Europe. That band went on to sell 30 million albums, so he did pretty well. Singer Zinny J. Zan went on to join the band Kingpin, which you would know better by their later name, Shotgun Messiah.

American hair band Poison used the chorus of Easy Action’s 1983 single “We Go Rocking” in their song “I Want Action,” which led to a lawsuit that the Swedish band won.

The original lineup just played their hit album That Makes One at the Sweden Rock Festival. That makes me happy.

There’s a whole bunch of mayhem, hairspray and murder in this movie, including people getting their eyes eaten, axes to the head and impalings. It’s pretty grisly, which is great, because it juxtaposes the ridiculous antics of this band and its groupies trying to make a movie in the snow.

The best part of all of this is that Easy Action were all afraid to act, so director Mats Helge Olsson got them drunk. You can tell — they’re destroyed for most of the movie. I advise that you’re in the same condition when you watch this.

From writer/director Lamberto Bava comes a modern-day reimagining of his father’s classic Black Sunday! also known as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil, this is scanned in 2K from the original camera negative for the first time ever in North America and has an interview with Bava.

The sale will take place from 12:01am EST on 11/29 to 11:59pm PST on 12/2 at Severin’s site.

A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michele Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from any movies in the Demons series. Soon, they find a metal mask — whoops, this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around, it causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they discover an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides that this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments of her revenge.

Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not also remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it?

That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, often reading it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he chose Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.

Davide is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancee Klaus Kinski here) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?

There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. Well, you get what you want, trust me. Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman as the demonic form of Anibas.

Man, what a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old tears and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws while she spits white fluid all over him. Oh yeah — she also has the facial scars that Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s version.

This is a hard movie to review, as you have to compare it one of the greatest movies ever made. Even Lamberto, I think, would admit that his father remains the best director. But his son tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sunday is the kind of film that’s going to live forever. Lamberto was able to create some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Mask and did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sect and Cemetery Man.

It even has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.

It’s entertaining, as all Italian late in the game horror is to me. And that’s enough to recommend it to you.

For far too long, this 1974 shocker directed by Aldo Lado has been dismissed as a Last House On the Left knockoff. Now it can be experienced as it should be, on its own merit, in UHD for the first time ever. Scanned in 4K from the original camera negative with over 5 hours of special features — such as commentary by Aldo Lado, moderated by Freak-O-Rama’s Federico Caddeo, and a soundtrack CD — this is why Severin remains one of the best physical media labels.

The sale will take place from 12:01am EST on 11/29 to 11:59pm PST on 12/2 at Severin’s site.

This Aldo Lado-directed piece of Italian grime also went by the names Night Train Murders, The New House on The Left, Second House on The Left, Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains, Late Night Trains, Last House Part II and Xmas Massacre, depending on the whims of fate (and Hallmark Releasing).

Margaret (Irene Miracle, who was also in Midnight Express, Inferno and Puppet Master) and Lisa are set to take the night train from Germany to Italy, but the train is full and they have to sit in a long corridor. They help Blackie (Flavio Bucci, Suspiria) and Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi, The Church) hide from the ticket taker as they board the train and hide from the cops. Of course, instead of saying thanks, they end up decimating the two girls, along with the help of an upper class blonde (Macha Méril, Deep Red) who has already turned the tables on Blackie’s attempts at assaulting her by seducing him. The two thugs really have no idea what they’re in for, because this mysterious blonde is more dangerous than both of them put together.

The whole time the girls are being victimized, murdered and forced into suicide, Lisa’s parents are hosting a Christmas dinner party where her doctor father speaks on the ills of a more violent society.

Later, when they arrive at the station to get the girls, they are worried when they don’t arrive. If you wonder, “Will they end up taking the people that killed them home?” then yes, you have seen your share of revenge movies. The most shocking thing is that the blonde may be the only survivor of the evil trio, as her fate is left open.

This video nasty is the kind of movie that I don’t put on when people come to visit.

While some decry the bumbling cop comedy in Craven’s film, this one jettisons any attempt at levity, adds some 1975 Italian style, gets a soundtrack from Morricone and gets way, way dark.

Lado also made Short Night of Glass Dolls and Who Saw Her Die?, two of the more original and downbeat giallo to follow in the wake of Argento. Even when he’s ripping someone off — not that Craven didn’t also rip off The Virgin Spring, so there are no innocents here — he can’t help outdoing his competition.

How lucky that this comes out on Black Friday from Severin, because despite the fact that it’s so relentlessly immoral, it is, after all, a holiday film.