88 Films has been releasing some incredible things this year, but The Project A Collection is the best set yet. It features both Jackie Chan films in a 4K UHD presentation with both the Hong Kong and Taiwan versions, as well as English and Cantonese-language options. There are so many extras, including a perfect-bound book, six lobby cards, a double-sided poster, a slipcase with brand-new artwork from Kung Fu Bob and interviews with Jackie Chan, Lee Hoi San, Mars, Yuen Biao, Dick Wei, Michael Chan Wai-Man, Michael Lai and Edward Tang. There’s even more, such as new audio commentaries by Frank Djeng and FJ DeSanto, making-of videos, outtakes, trailers, still galleries, the Japanese ending and more!

You can order this from MVD.

Project A (1983): Project A has a clock tower stunt in it, but Jackie Chan had not seen the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd when he made this movie, as they were not available on home video. He saw this as the evolution of comedy, action and martial arts that he’d been working on since The Young Master.

This movie and Dragon Lord were the first films since Jackie came back from his initial failed time in America and he had something to prove.

Sergeant Dragon Ma (Chan) is part of the Hong Kong Marine Police, which is battling both pirates and their Hong Kong Police rivals. After one fight too many, the Marine and regular police have to join forces.

Beyond Dragon Ma, Project A also has Sammo Hung as Zhuo “Fei” Yifei and Yuen Baio as Inspector Hong Tin-Tzu. In time, they all join together to face pirate lord Sam Pau (Dick Wei), who is smuggling guns directly from the cops.

Up until Project A came out, Hong Kong movies didn’t have the large sets and attention to period detail that other movies did. It’s also a film that isn’t all fighting, but instead a mix of action and combat.

Project A Part II (1987):Sergeant Dragon Ma (Jackie Chan) is back and has been sent on a new mission, far from the pirates who have pledged to kill him at the end of the first film. He soon learns that his new assignment, Sai Wan Police Station, is full of corrupt police like Superintendent Chun (Lam Wai), all except for one officer. He takes that man, Ho (Kenny Ho) and three of his friends to try to arrest gangster Tiger “Awesome Wolf” Au (Chan Wai-man) and is nearly killed. He’s saved at the last moment by his friends in the Marine Police.

Once he gets through that challenge, Dragon gets set up for a jewel robbery and must work with revolutionaries to clear his name. If that’s not enough, he also has three incredibly attractive women to deal with in Yesan (Maggie Cheung), Miss Pak (Rosamund Kwan) and Carina (Carina Lau), who gets kidnapped by the same criminals who have tried to ruin Dragon Ma’s reputation.

Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung only have cameos in this, allowing Chan to take center stage. Who knew that a martial arts movie could pay tribute to the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton while changing the way fights would be filmed? Instead of lining the bad guys up one at a time, Chan battles numerous opponents at once.

By the end, even the pirates love Jackie. This movie is worth watching so many times as the sets, costumes and action has to be savored.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Amityville Zoo, Planet Amityville, Amityville Doorknob, Amityville Lockdown, Amityville Isolation, The Amityville Amityville and Amityville Fridge aren’t real but I would totally watch them if they did make them. After all, this is the 53rd Amityville movie I’ve watched and I don’t see stopping any time soon.

Movie Timelines host Josh Spiegel directed, wrote and stars in this as himself. In the middle of a new pandemic, separated from his wife Christie and daughter Stella (played by his real-life wife and daughter), he keeps trying to update his YouTube channel and have online meetings with horror fans in the midst of losing his job and being mailed a cursed doorknob from Amityville that puts him into his own horror movie.

Then everyone he meets has their heads explode and he learns from multiple Amityville director Lars Van Floof that every Amityville movie is cursed by an item sold from the original house. I believe this, as much as I believe that a demon has cursed me to watch every one of these films.

Made on a low budget and a found footage film, this feels made for people like, well, me. People who keep watching Amityville movies and get mad at themselves but then feel a sense of joy when a new one comes out. Josh is from Pittsburgh as well, even though we’ve never met, and therefore I feel some kinship for the terror he endures as he goes deep into the heart of 112 Ocean Avenue.

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Nick Box claims that this is a re-imagining of his earlier film Elevator to Insanity, which itself was a spoof of elevated horror, and that this makes fun of both that genre and Amityville movies.

A photographer (Gus Capucci) gets on an elevator that he rides for the entire movie.

That’s it.

Sure, sometimes a woman (Bryonny) gets on and gets off, but they never interact. There’s also a ballet dancer who he sees when the doors open and also a lady that screams at him for six minutes. That’s right. Six entire minutes of one scream.

Sometimes, he escapes for a moment, then hears a whole bunch of phrases like “Believe in yourself” before he’s back on the elevator, the woman gets on and off, and we watch him stand there for around forty minutes.

Finally, he gets to the floor he should be on and takes photos of corpses, just in time for a jump scare. Someone else gets in the elevator as the movie comes to a close.

This has a $3000 budget and I have no idea where it went. It’s like with each movie, Nick Box is trying to make the worst Amityville sequel, which is impossible because you can’t go lower than zero, right?

I’m waiting for a good Amityville and this supposedly makes fun of movies that just put that name before another movie and yet, it does the same thing. When I’m dying, I’ll remember this movie and hate that I wasted moments of my life watching it.

You can watch this on YouTube but please don’t.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Weird Woman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 22, 1973 at 11:30 p.m.

The second of The Inner Sanctum Mysteries series of movies, these Universal B movies took two weeks and $150,000 to make. Director Reginald LeBorg was given the script on a Friday and had until the following Monday to start making this. It was only his third film but I think he did quite well, despite having to use the prefab sets and day players.

While he’s on vacation in the South Seas, Professor of Ethnology Norman Reed (Lon Chaney Jr.)  meets a jungle white goddess named Paula (Anne Gwynne, one of the first scream queens and the grandmother of Chris Pine) who he first encountered when she was just a child and her father was a professor of archaeology who worked with Reed. Going by the actual ages, she’s 26 and Chaney is 38, so it doesn’t seem all that far apart (I mean, the same age difference between my wife and me) but physically, she seems like a child compared to Chaney. It’s also strange that he knew her when he was just a little girl and now he’s in love with her, taking her out of the jungle and back to Monroe College as his wife.

This upsets Ilona Carr (Evelyn Ankers, who was often cast opposite of Chaney), who always saw Reed as hers. Professor Reed is one of those absent minded men who surrounds himself with younger women, like his new secretary Margaret (lovely Lois Collier), who fall in love with him and are decimated when he actually does show attention to another woman. It’s not like he’s using his status and authority to take advantage of them, but in today’s world, it still seems weird.

When Prof. Millard Sawtelle (Ralph Morgan) is discovered using a student’s essay as the major part of his most famous work, he shoots himself. This angers his wife Evelyn (Elizabeth Russell), who thinks that Paula is pushing her husband to take over the department. As for the couple, he’s forced her to give up all of her voodoo, so she feels like she can no longer protect the man she loves.

This is quite important as Melissa’s jealous boyfriend David (Phil Brown, who would many years later be Uncle Owen Lars) comes to kill him and ends up shooting himself, which makes it look like Reed has killed the boy who has come to punish him for touching his pure lady.

Ankers and Gwynne were best friends, so when the normally kind Ankers had to act mean, the entire cast and crew would start to laugh.

Written by Brenda Weisberg and Scott Daring, this is based on the Fritz Leiber story Conjure Witch, which was remade as Burn, Witch, Burn!

This is also part of the Universal Shock Theater package of 52 films. These movies made up much of the library of channels that had horror host programs, much like Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wizard of Mars was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 10, 1976 at 1:00 a.m.

David L. Hewitt was an illusionist in the Dr. Jeckyll’s Strange Show who wanted to be in the movies. He wrote to Forrest Ackerman and gave him his script Journey into the Unknown, which became The Time Travelers. After that, he directed the 3D short Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, which played with spook shows, as well as Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors. He’s also Gorga in that giant monkey movie.

When this movie was released by Regal Video in the 80s, it was retitled Alien Massacre and it could have either been this movie or Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors in the tape you got. That movie has no aliens. Neither has a massacre. But the box art and tagline, “Blood flows like water,” got plenty of people to watch whatever it was.

Let’s head to the future of 1975, where Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee), Charlie (Jerry Rannow) and Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt) have barely made it to Mars alive. After crash landing, they battle monsters in the canals of the red planet, avoid a volcano and get caught in a dust storm, all of which makes Charlie lose it and start shooting his rifle at everything.

They find a stone road that leads them to a city that is empty other than a dead Martian and a silver globe which mentally directs them to fixing what has been broken and reveals the face of John Carradine, who tells them how Mars once ruled the universe before coming back to their home to ponder the next stage of evolution. Then, the city goes back into the planet.

Obviously, this is The Wizard of Oz in space, just like Zardoz would kind of be a decade later. That movie wasn’t made for $33,000 with a Don Post mask and it was not also edited for spook show audiences. It also rips off plenty of sound design from Forbidden Planet.

John Carradine gets to read a long speech, intoning ““Space is vast, time is long. It was then that we impaled time on an axis. Eternal stillness, transgression upon time. Time tugs us to our yesterdays almost as strong as all the unborn tomorrows that stretch through all eternity.” That’s really all it took to make me love this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Woman Eater was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 28, 1966 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 19, 1967.

At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.

Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.

Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.

The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.

What!?!

Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.

You can watch this on Tubi.