Manga creator Junji Ito grew up in a house where he was afraid to go to the bathroom, as it was at the end of a long underground tunnel filled with water crickets. While working as a dental technician, he was drawing at night and submitted a story to a magazine called Monthly Halloween that would become Tomie. The story was inspired by the death of a classmate, which Ito felt was odd that the boy just disappeared from the world. So he came up with the idea of a girl who died but just came back as if nothing has happened.

Director Ataru Oikawa didn’t want to make the movie version to be filled with gore, but more of a horrific youth drama. He still sought out Ito’s approval, taking parts from the original “Photograph” and “Kiss” stories and even had the creator’s approval for the casting of Miho Kanno as Tomie.

The police are looking into the murder of Tomie, a high school girl, which was followed over the next three years by the suicide or insanity of nine other students and a teacher. Soon, the detective assigned to the case learns that Tomie has been murdered and reborn in Gifu since the 1960’s, just as Japan joined the industrial era.

A classmate of Tomie, Tsukiko Izumisawa, can’t remember the three months around her friend’s murder. And oh yeah — her neighbor is nursing a strange baby that soon grows into another Tomie, which seduces Tsukiko’s boyfriend before attacking her at her therapist’s office by shoving cockroaches down her mouth. So our protagonist’s boyfriend does what any of us would do — he cuts the head off Tomie and takes Tsukiko to bury the body in the woods, which of course backfires. Tomie reappears and kisses Tsukiko full on the lips, who responds by setting her on fire.

That said, a few months later, Tsukiko begins to realize that she is becoming Tomie herself.

While not a horror movie, this certainly is a strange movie. For some reason, in the glut of Japanese horror that was badly remade in the U.S., this series never showed up. I would assume that’s because there’s no easy hook to grab on to.

The Arrow Video release of Tomie has audio commentary by critic and Japanese cinema expert Amber T.; interviews with director Ataru Oikawa, actress Mami Nakamura and producer Mikihiko Hirata; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Zack Davisson and Eugene Thacker and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck.

You can buy it from MVD.

After Easy Money, Saturday Night Live veteran James Signorelli directed one more film. This one — starring Cassandra Peterson as her Elvira character.

In 1981, six years after Sinister Seymour was off the air, the producers of LA’s Fright Night decided to do another show and asked Vampira — Maila Nurmi — to help them with the project. There were creative differences — supposedly Nurmi wanted Lola Falana to play Vampira — and soon the station just did the show themselves (for her side of the story, please watch Vampira and Me).

Peterson had already lived a crazy life before she auditioned and won the role of the new horror host. She was a Vegas showgirl at 17, briefly dated Elvis, played a showgirl in Diamonds Are Forever, posed for men’s magazines like High Society, tried out to be Ginger in a new Gilligan’s Island, was on the cover of Tom Waits’ album (she claims that she doesn’t remember but it totally could be her), played in rock bands in Italy, ended up in Fellini’s Roma, joined the improv group The Groundlings and then ended up as a DQ on KROQ.

Is this Elvira?

Anyways, back to Elvira. The station allowing her to create the image of her character. Originally, she wanted to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers, but ended up with the punky and busty look we’ve all come to know and love.

Before the first episode even aired, Normi sued, claiming that Elvira was too close to her character. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, but they are quite similar. However, her Valley Girl delivery and sarcastic tone was a real difference and Elvira went from local star to pop icon, which led to this, her first movie.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark quits her job in LA after the station’s new owner has a #metoo moment with her. She wants to start an act in Vegas, but needs $50,000. Luckily, her great aunt Morgana has just died and she has to travel to Fallwell, Massachusetts to claim the inheritance.

So what does she get? A mansion, a recipe book and Morgana’s pet poodle, Algonquin. But once she’s in town, she learns that no one is allowed to have fun and she sets out to change everyone’s grey demeanor. Oh yeah — and her uncle Vincent just wants the cookbook — which is a book of spells — and he also wants to sacrifice her so that he can take over the world. Thus, magic battles ensue, Algonquin becomes a rat at one point and the town’s morality club gets hit with a sex spell that gets them all arrested for indecent exposure.

Fellow Groundling Edie McClurg shows up as one of the villains, as does former Grease and Taxi heartthrob Jeff Conaway. Other Groundlings in the film are Lynne Marie Stewart, Deryl Carroll, Joseph Arias, Tress MacNeille and John Paragon.

Scripted by Sam Egan and Paragon, who is better known as Jambi and Pterri from his Pee-Wee’s Playhouse days, along with Peterson, this movie’s entertainment level will depend on how much you love puns and Elvira. I adore her, so this movie is totally fun for me.

The Arrow Video release of this film features a brand new restoration of the film from a 4K scan of original film elements. Plus, you get an introduction to the film by director James Signorelli and commentary by him. There’s also commentary by Elvira’s webmaster Patterson Lundquist and a third commentary track with Cassandra Peterson, Edie McClurg and writer John Paragon. You also get a making of feature, Too Macabre – The Making of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, and another on the making of the Pot Monster. This also includes trailers, storyboards, image galleries, reversible art and a collector’s booklet featuring writing by Sam Irving, Kat Ellinger and Patterson Lundquist.

You can buy it on UHD or blu ray from MVD.

Warner Brothers hired David Kajganich to write they wanted to be a straight-forward remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Kajganich changed the script to reflect contemporary times. I believe that each generation gets the body snatchers that it deserves, from the Cold War McCarthy menace of the 1950s, the end of the world gloom of the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the gory yet doomed 1990s Body Snatchers.

The explanation for the aliens in this version is very scientific. A space Shuttle crash lets loose a fungus that is scattered across the country. It infects people and when they go to sleep, it reprograms them. CDC director Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) is the first to be changed and his ex-wife Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) notices that he has become someone else. One of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright), says the very same thing.

This film is way ahead of the conspiracy theories of today, as Kaufman uses a flu vaccine to further spread the alien contagion throughout the world. I’m shocked more Twitter — sorry, X, I forgot — users haven’t been screaming about how this movie was the government telling us what they were going to do.

Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) attend a dinner party where they witness the transformation of a human into an alien. By now, they’ve been doing research with Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) that shows that anyone who has had acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is immune from the aliens. Thanks to movie logic, this includes Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond).

Carol is eventually infected but this also brings in a bit of Elm Street as you must stay awake or you will be an alien. Luckily, she remains alert and her son is the key to fixing things, even if the society that the human race returns to is violent and emotional, unlike the perfectly ordered world that the aliens promise.

Originally directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel as a nearly effects free invasion movie, the studio was unhappy and asked for The Wachowskis to rewrite and reshoot some of the movie. After a year of the movie not progressing any further, James McTeigue was hired to shoot action scenes. During these, Kidman was injured and broke her ribs. That said, she made $17 million off this.

Remember when I said that each generation gets the bodysnatchers it deserves? This one is very 2007. I can’t remember much of that time and it seemed that everything was being remade as a faster and less soulless version of what came before. It’s a great looking film, it has pleasant leads and it tries to be about the forces that rule the world. Yet it comes after three versions of Jack Finney’s story The Body Snatchers that each had a point of view about the world and how it needed to change. This one ends with no horrifying conclusion, just the pod people waking up as if they were in a dream. Compare that to the horrific closes of the 1970s and 1990s takes.

The Arrow Video release of The Invasion has so many extras, including audio commentary by film critics Andrea Subisati and Alexandra West, co-hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast; visual essays by film scholars Alexandra Heller Nicholas and Josh Nelson; archival features from the 2007 release; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics William Bibbiani and Sally Christie; a reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket and a double-sided fold out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.

You can order this movie on UHD or blu ray from MVD.

Sam Raimi was, at one time, mostly known for horror. Of the novels of Scott B. Smith you would think he’d make a movie of, maybe The Ruins would make more sense. That said, A Simple Plan reminds you that he once lived in the same house as the Coen Brothers when all were new to Hollywood. That said, he makes this movie all his own.

Wright County, Minnesota mostly has a feed mill and lots of snow. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and his wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) are two of the few college-educated people there. Hank’s brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and his friend Lou Chambers (Brent Briscoe) are closer than the two actual brothers are. This is tested when the men find a crashed plane and $4.4 million dollars. Hank wants to turn it in. Jacob and Lou change his mind, saying he should keep it until the snow melts and if no one brings up the money when the plane is found, they can keep it.

They all agree to not discuss the money with anyone except that Hank tells Sarah. She thinks they should take some money back to the plane. On the way, Hank and Jacob are surprised by a farmer on a snow vehicle. In the heat of the moment, they kill him and send his body and vehicle into the icy river.

Sarah believes that the money was a ransom for a kidnapped heiress from Michigan, who was abducted by two brothers by the names of Stephen and Vernon Bokovsky. She tells him that there’s no victim in the crime now, as one of the brothers had to be the dead body in the plane. The plan falls to pieces though when Lou demands his money. He’s been spending too much and might lose his truck. He threatens to go to the cops. Sarah says that they should kill him, a shocking moment as she’s just given birth to their first child.

Sarah says that they should frame Lou for the farmer’s murder by getting him drunk, making him confess and recording it. Jacob is upset that he has to betray his friend and it almost all goes wrong when Lou pulls his gun. It ends up with Lou and his wife Nancy dead and Hank having to spin the story to the police of what exactly happened. The next problem is that Jacob mentioned the plane, so Sheriff Carl Jenkins (Chelcie Ross) makes Hank show him where it is, bringing along FBI agent Neil Baxter (Gary Cole).

This is probably where you should stop reading if you want to watch this movie.

Baxter is, of course, Vernon Bokovsky. Somehow, Hank is able to kill him but now Sheriff Jenkins is also killed. That means that another story has to be told. And that’s when Jacob tells him that he’s tired. He’s either going to kill himself or force his brother to kill him, creating an alibi so that Hank can live free. It turns out that when he tells the story to the real government agents, they tell him all of the money was marked. He burns it in his fireplace, realizing that he will always be haunted by what he has done.

Paxton and Thornton had been scheduled to be in this movie for years. John Boorman was the original director and the film got cancelled. Neither believed they would ever be in the film but luckily, it all came together. This was one of the first movies where Raimi worried more about the performances of his actors instead of the action of the shots.

I miss Bill Paxton. I realize I never knew him outside of the roles he played but I feel like some part of me — I know it’s strange — knew he was a good man. In this, Hank is an ordinary person who somehow becomes a level of evil that he had no idea that he was capable of. Thornton also plays a role that any other actor would treat as a message part. His diminished intelligence is just who he is; he has other smarts that somehow make up for his lack of intelligence.

The Arrow Video release of A Simple Plan has a new 4K remaster from the original negative by Arrow Films, approved by director Sam Raimi. There’s also two new commentaries, one by critics Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme and the other from production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein with filmmaker Justin Beahm. There are also interviews with cinematographer Alar Kivilo, actors Becky Ann Baker and Chelcie Ross, and on-set interviews with Paxton, Thornton, Fonda, Raimi and producer Jim Jacks. Plus, this set has behind-the-scenes footage, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin and an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Bilge Ebiri and an excerpt from the book The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi by John Kenneth Muir.

You can order the 4K and blu ray releases from MVD.

Princess (Season Hubley, who was Nikki in Hardcore) is walking the streets to make money for her daughter Lisa losing her job. Sunset Boulevard is dangerous, as you know if you’ve watched the same movies that I have, but never more dangerous when pimp Ramrod (Wings Hauser) is running things.

LAPD vice squad sergeant Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) brings Princess down to the morgue to look at the body of her dead friend Ginger (Nina Blackwood, former MTV VJ) and tell her that she’ll be busted for cocaine and lose her daughter if she doesn’t help. Yeah, every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.

Even when she helps the cops catch Ramrod, he easily escapes, starting a reign of terror on the Sunset Strip looking for Princess, promising that she will be killed. He even castrates her former pimp, Sugar Pimp Dorsey (Fred “Rerun” Berry losing his dick? No!), and beating men and women alike into the great beyond all as he gets closer and closer. At the same time, Princess is turning tricks in fancy mansions, getting into coffins with old men who like to pretend that they are dead. That’s because she knows that the vice squad will never be able to change what happens on the streets.

I would not deserve this site and you reading it if I didn’t mention that one of the working girls is Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith.

Gary Sherman should get more credit than he does. I’ve never seen a boring movie from him. Wings Hauser is also an absolute maniac beyond all other lunatics in this and even sang “Neon Slime,” the song that plays at the end.

Supposedly, Martin Scorsese got in a fight with Dawn Steele over this movie, saying that it deserved to be the best movie of the year.

The opening says, “The motion picture you are about to see has been produced with the cooperation of law enforcement authorities. Though a work of fiction, it is a composite of events that have actually taken place on the streets of Hollywood.” That’s true. Producers Brian Frankish and James Robert Dyer approached Sandy Howard about making a realit documentary about prostitution with interviews from pimps, sex workers and the LAPD Vice Squad. The project eventually became a movie with Howard, Kenneth Peter and Robert Vincent O’Neil working on the story.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink.

Neon Slime

• 1.5 oz. Midori
• .5 oz. Southern Comfort
• .5 oz. sweet and sour mix (or .25 oz. lemon juice and .25 oz. simple syrup)
• .25 oz. egg whites
• 1 oz. lemon lime soda

1. Put all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake it up.
2. Let it sit for a moment, then shake it again. Pour over ice and enjoy.

Also known as Barn of the Naked Dead and Nightmare Circus, this is one of those movies where no one is even sure who made it. Sure, Alan Rudolph is listed as the director, but stuntman Gerald Cormier — also the leader of the film’s distributor CMC Pictures — is credited. Some say that he’s Rudolph. Star Andrew Prine says that two other directors made this before Rudolph and Cormier was one of them. Writer Ralph Harolde could also be Rudolph.

Andre (Prine) has built a circus in the desert, located right on top of a former atomic test site, and keeps kidnapping showgirls like Simone (Manuela Thiess), Sheri (Sherry Alberoni) and Corinne (Gyl Roland) and even female scientists, training all of them to perform for him. He also has a cougar that he lets loose on them and there’s something inside the barn that loves to kill women.

Simone is worshipped as the lost mother Andre can’t have, as he tells her of his past. That’s better than Sheri, who has been picked to be the new Reptile Girl as Andre flings snakes at her. Then, the girls free Andre’s father (Gerald Cormier) from the barn. Nuclear fallout has made him into a crazed psychopath and he kills everyone in his path with only two girls escaping. That’s the scene that the agent of the Vegas girls, Derek Moore (Chuck Niles), and the cops discover when they get there.

Andrew Prine said, “This is the only movie I ever regretted making.”

He should embrace it. I love the circus tent in the middle of the desert and the sheer lunacy of this movie. It’s just so out there and it shouldn’t work yet it does just long enough to rush to its bloody end.

Here’s a drink.

Barn Door of the Naked Dead

• 1.5 oz. vodka
• 5 oz. pineapple juice
• .5 oz. cranberry juice

1. Pour the vodka into a glass filled with crushed ice.
2. Top with pineapple juice and float cranberry juice to complete.

Also known as The Hooker Cult Murders, The Pyx is based on the novel by John Buell. The pyx is a container used by Catholics to hold the Eucharist, literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the form of blessed unleavened bread.

While directed by Harvey Hart and written by Robert Schlitt, this was a movie that Curtis Harrington had wanted to make for some time.

Elizabeth Lucy (Karen Black) is a barely dressed sex worker who fell out a window, a bloodstream filled with heroin, clutching a crucifix and a pyx. Sergeant Jim Henderson (Christopher Plummer) wants to figure out why she died, which takes us back through the last few months of her life.

As he grows closer to the truth, meeting the people in her life, each of them dies in different ways. That’s because Elizabeth was the victim of a cult who had desecrated a piece of communion and were offering it to her as part of a Black Mass, presided over by a Catholic priest. As she was trying to save her soul, she jumps out a window to her death.

That priest, Keerson (Jean-Louis Roux) claims to be possessed by the devil and only the bullets of Henderson’s gun set him free.

The end of this is strange from a Catholic perspective. Suicide is one of the biggest sins of the church and it keeps the soul in limbo or sends it to Hell, depending on which of the teachers you believe. Would Elizabeth be forgiven for this death as she did it to remain free of Satanic power? I wonder.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink.

Black Mass (thanks to this recipe)

• 1.5 oz. white rum
• .5 oz. Malibu
• .5 oz. blue curacao
• .5 oz. Campari
• 3 oz. pineapple juice
• .25 oz. simple syrup
• .25 oz. lime juice

1. Put all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice.
2. Pour over crushed ice and drink up.

Noel Black made his name with a short entitled Skaterdater and he made Pretty Poison, which is an incredible movie but died at the box office. Then, his career fell apart. He said, “The gold-plated nail in my career coffin was pounded when, after the box-office failure of Pretty Poison, I accepted a dreadful project, Cover Me Babe, that never should have been made. I reckoned that it was better to stay active than to wait for a project I believed in. That was a mistake. It was followed by another mistake, Jennifer on My Mind, one of the dozens of unsuccessful drug pictures at the time.”

After working in TV, he came back to the big screen — or tried to — with this film, which was originally called Marianne. It took six years to come out on video under the title Mirrors.

He also directed Mischief and Private School, two teen sex comedies that are way better than that genre may lead one to believe.

Marianne Whitman (Kitty Wynn, Sharon Spencer from The Exorcist) and her husband Gary (William Paul Burns) are on their honeymoon in New Orleans where she’s soon the concern of a voodoo group who want to put another soul into her. To get what they want, they’ll murder dogs and even her husband in a dust-delivered asthma attack which is really the wildest way someone dies in a 70s occult movie outside of The Omen‘s gore Rube Goldberg destructions of humanity.

Dr. Godard (Peter Donat) tries to help, but Marianne is trapped in a slow burn 70s possession film with an ambiguous ending. Visually, this is a great film. As for the story, well, it’s a mess. It does have a great party scene — every 70s occult movie should — with Willie Tee And The Wild Magnolias funking it out.

I love this in spite of its problems.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Here’s a drink.

Voodoo

• 1 oz. curacao
• 1 oz. 99 Bananas
• 1 oz. Midori
• 1.5 oz. Malibu
• 3 oz. orange juice

1. Mix all ingredients in a shaker with ice.
2. Pour over crushed ice and stay out of New Orleans.

I’m still trying to figure this out.

Made as Nightmare at Blood Castle, this is about Dr. Arthur Blackwood (Bill Greer, who co-wrote the script with Deedy Peters, who were a comedy team; he would go on to write and produce House Calls, Goodnight Beantown and Charles In Charge; she would be in 17 episodes of House Calls), who runs his own sanitarium and is doing experiments on the forces of evil. Deedy also plays his wife in this, who is working with the sheriff (Jim Dean) to figure out why some teens have been killed. She should be looking inside her own house, as her husband has a hunchback (Pierre Agostino) and they’re whipping girls and locking people up in cages.

This is the kind of movie that has a wig budget, a spaghetti monster, guillotine suicide and dialogue with lines such as “When I saw Mr. Zolak’s head severed from his body, I felt a definite sexual thrill. I must be very careful.” Also snakes.

Somehow, this is PG. 1970s PG. You know what that means.

Director Charles Nizet also made The Ravager, Voodoo Heartbeat and Rescue Force. There’s nothing like this, a regional movie in the desert that has women put in coffins with poisonous snakes and it feels perverted but it’s not as dirty as it feels, which means that it’s really deranged.

A cave blows up at the end. I still, as I said, have no idea why.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Here’s a drink.

Spaghetti Monster (based on the drink from Strawbs Bar in Leeds, England)

• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. gin
• 1 oz. rum
• 1 oz. tequila
• 4 oz. orange juice
• .5 oz. grenadine

1. Shake up everything with ice in a cocktail shaker other than the grenadine.
2. Pour in a glass and top with grenadine.

William Castle mortgaged his house and formed William Castle Productions in 1958. For his fifth movie after Macabre, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler and 13 Ghosts, Castle had another of his gimmick ideas: the Fright Break.

Before the end of the movie, a 45-second timer would tell audience members that they could get a free refund if they left now. The first night Castle tried this, they all did. Some even came back for a free second show, so he had numbered and color coded tickets. This cut down on the people seeing his movie for free, but there were still some people who wanted a cheap night out.

Castle wouldn’t allow them.

He created the Coward’s Corner, where a voice over would laugh at the people leaving, forcing them into a yellow corner. He even wanted to paint their backs yellow, but this was too much for theaters.

I learned about this from John Waters, who said this in his book Crackpot: “He came up with “Coward’s Corner,” a yellow cardboard booth, manned by a bewildered theater employee in the lobby. When the Fright Break was announced, and you found that you couldn’t take it any more, you had to leave your seat and, in front of the entire audience, follow yellow footsteps up the aisle, bathed in a yellow light. Before you reached Coward’s Corner, you crossed yellow lines with the stencilled message: “Cowards Keep Walking.” You passed a nurse (in a yellow uniform? … I wonder), who would offer a blood-pressure test. All the while a recording was blaring, “Watch the chicken! Watch him shiver in Coward’s Corner!” As the audience howled, you had to go through one final indignity – at Coward’s Corner you were forced to sign a yellow card stating, “I am a bona fide coward.” Very, very few were masochistic enough to endure this. The one percent refund dribbled away to a zero percent, and I’m sure that in many cities a plant had to be paid to go through this torture. No wonder theater owners balked at booking a William Castle film. It was all just too complicated.”

Emily (Joan Marshall using the name Jean Arless) convinces the bellboy at a hotel to marry her and she pays $2,000 to him. Late in the evening, they drive to the justice of the peace and start the ceremony, only to kill the official and run, laughing about it to the mute old woman, Helga (Eugenie Leontovich) that she cares for.

Then we meet Miriam Webster (Patricia Breslin), who has just come back to America with her brother Warren (spoiler if I tell you). Warren is the sole heir of the family, as their abusive father has just died, and if he marries, he will get the money. Miriam is going to marry Karl (Glenn Corbett), who catches Emily destroying his fiance’s flower shop. It turns out that Emily and Warren are married. They’re never seen together.

Well, after Helga goes up the stairs on a stair lift and her head falls off, Emily is revealed. This has a lot of Psycho in it, yet it still feels like a unique film. It’s certainly a major reveal and I’d rather you watch the movie. I’d like if you’d watch several William Castle movies.

Here’s a drink.

Killer Kool-Aid

• 2 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. Southern Comfort
• 2 oz. Midori
• 1 oz. amaretto
• 6 oz. grape Kool-Aid

1. Shake everything up with ice in a cocktail shaker.
2. Pour in a glass filled with crushed ice and drink.