New York City is a concrete jungle where the neon lights don’t reach the shadows and the shadows have teeth. Something is stalking the midnight streets, leaving a trail of shredded suits and empty veins behind. The NYPD is baffled, the morgues are overflowing, and the local news is calling it a massacre.
The victims? All are looking for a little company. Want to party?
In this world, we have Jeffrey (Jack Dillon), a nobody in a city of millions. He’s a sad sack with a dead-end job and a heart full of dusty dreams who has gone incel to the point that he spends money on lovemaking instead of dating. But then he falls in love with Pandora (Melissa Bacelar), a sex worker who finally does pay attention to him, at least when she isn’t luring other men to their deaths, seemingly lulling them into unconsciousness while she chomps big bites right out of their skin.
Also known as Skinned Alive, this was directed by James Adam Tucker and written by Joshua Nelson. This is an interesting take not just on relationships, but on women, as we wonder whether Pandora is a vampire, a cannibal, a zombie, or just a normal person with a taste for earth pig.
Jeffrey represents a specific brand of modern isolation. He isn’t just lonely; he’s hollow. By bypassing the work of dating for the transaction of sex, he’s already treating human connection as a commodity. Pandora is his perfect mirror. She takes people’s consumption literally. While Jeffrey wants to consume her time and body for emotional validation, she wants to consume his literal vitality.
Directed by Mac Ahlberg and written by Peer Guldbrandsen, this film promises, “NOW the sexual revolution is complete.”
We start in another dimension, as an upside-down woman writhes, and then we get an erotic snake scene, and part of me was like, “Yes, this is what I was looking for,” all before such an inconvenience as a plot rears its ugly head.
Siv (Gun Falk) is dtf as the kids say, and I don’t mean Danish Talking to Fjords. Her daughter, Birthe (Inger Sundh), is shocked, just absolutely gobsmacked by her mom’s antics, such as the toys she’s been gifted by Dr. Leo Smith (Klaus Pagh), which pushes her between the thighs of erotic dancer Lisa (Ellen Faison) and then Lisa’s brother Stephen (Tom Scott).
Come for the sex, try not to leave for the endless hippies smoking pot and fighting bikers scenes.
Ahlberg is still a cinematographer to this day, working on Full Moon movies, as well as being behind the camera for films like Innocent Blood, Striking Distance, the first three House movies and Re-Animator. He also directed Nana, Fanny Hill, Around the World with Fanny Hill and the other two movies in this series.
After coming off yet another successful comedy tour, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, a cultural force) has a party at his mansion that soon gets gate-crashed by the fuzz. They’re racist, they’re angry, they’re reactionary: they’re cops. They also want to kill Dolemite for sleeping with the sheriff’s wife, so they shoot her just in time for him to kill a deputy. He did not shoot the sheriff, so to speak.
The story changes up to have Dolemite head out to save Queen Bee (Lady Reed) from a pimp named Cavaletti (Herb Graham), all while the sheriff (J.B. Baron) pins the murder of his wife on our hero.
Like many of Moore’s films, this was directed by Cliff Roquemore and written by Jerry Jones, Moore and Jimmy Lynch, who is Mr. Motion in the film. A young Ernie Hudson appears, as does the Bronson Cave, the same place Batman lives. Watch this and know: no permits were necessary. Rudy Ray Moore famously operated on Dolemite Time, which meant filming until the cops showed up or the money ran out.
Like a deranged Tom Jones, scenes of male-on-female oral sex are intercut with fried chicken eating, as well as moments when Dolemite services a woman so effectively that the entire house falls down around the bed. Dolemite breaks the fourth wall, pausing and rewinding the action, and there are evil female torturers with witch makeup. This feels like the product of the stickiest of the icky, and I would have it no other way.
There’s an anachronistic moment where Dolemite screams at an effeminate man, played by Doug Senior, who appeared on our live stream this weekend. Doug may not enjoy this part, as it’s really homophobic, but he had great things to say about Dolemite, who he said was soft spoken and kind when the cameras were off, but barking and wild when he needed to be.
This scene is part of the hyper-masculine, often reactionary tropes found in 1970s street comedy. However, the contrast between Moore’s onscreen persona and his off-screen kindness is a well-documented part of his legacy. He was a savvy businessman who played a character to empower a specific demographic, even if that character carried the prejudices of its time.
Made for $150,000, this made back $4.5 million. Talk about return on investment.
Directed by Richard Michaels (Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean) and penned by Leigh Chapman, the former actress turned screenwriter who wrote the Chuck Norris cult hit The Octagon, this film is a strange cocktail of industry cynicism and low-budget grit.
The film stars Adam Roarke as Person and Larry Bishop as Brandy. If those names sound familiar, they should; both were staples of the leather-and-chrome biker circuit (Hells Angels on Wheels, The Savage Seven). Here, they play two stuntmen who have finally had enough of the shallow Tinseltown grind. Trading the movie set for the open road, they decide to pivot into the high-stakes world of international narcotics. Joined by Person’s sister Brigitte, played by the ethereal Alexandra Hay (Skidoo), the trio heads south of the border to move weight across Mexico.
There’s no real story to speak of, but it does feature early roles for Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner as the couple the bikers are buying drugs from. Despite being filmed in 1971, it sat on a shelf for three years. When it finally emerged, it felt less like a hard-hitting crime drama and more like a nihilistic, 84-minute sitcom episode where the punchlines are replaced by dust and desperation.
There isn’t a traditional story to cling to. Instead, the film functions as a vibe-heavy road movie. It’s a hazy journey through the desert that feels exactly like the era it was born in—unfiltered, aimless, and slightly hungover. Whether that’s your jam or a total drag depends entirely on how much you value vibe over plot. As they say, your mileage may vary.
Also known as Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom and Psycho Sex Fiend, this José Ramón Larraz movie has some amazing taglines like “Are You Planning an Affair? We Can Give You 7 Good Reasons Not to Have Your Next Affair at The House That Vanished, And They’re All DEAD!! 1. George 2. Marsha 3. Ted 4. Linda 5. Ronnie 6. Alice 7. Larry” and “Is it too soon to talk about ’72…that time Paul and Valerie fell in love at first sight and began searching for a place to have an affair — and they kept searching until they found…The House That Vanished.” I mean, they did tell us that it was “In the Great HITCHCOCK Tradition!”
Picked up by American-International Pictures in the U.S., trimmed by 15 minutes and given a really similar campaign – actually, it’s the exact same — as The Last House On the Left, this finds Larraz playing with his favorite toys: fashionable women in danger, pervy photographers, houses in the London countryside, sexual menace and murder. He kept going back to this well for a bit before throwing Satanism into the stew and, if anything, increasing the sheer levels of filth in his movies. And we were all the better for it.
Valerie Jennings (Andrea Allan) is one of those gorgeous women continually threatened by nearly every frame of this movie, starting when she and her photographer boyfriend Terry (Alex Leppard) travel to a shuttered hovel of a home deep in the London woods, a place that’s empty save for a room filled with women’s passports. As they hide in a closet when a new couple arrives, they don’t get to enjoy watching them make love; instead, the male dispatches the female with a switchblade. She runs, and Terry does too, but she never finds him, narrowly escaping to the safety of the big city.
She finds Terry’s car and a modeling portfolio with one image of a girl missing. She asks her friends Mike (Lawrence Keane) and Stella (Annabella Wood) what to do next, but they tell her that she and Terry have committed a crime and need not tell the police. Meanwhile, Mike introduces her to Paul (Karl Lanchbury, a Larraz villain in numerous entries), a mask maker who invites her to dinner with his aunt Susanna (Maggie Walker). If you’ve seen enough Larraz movies by now, you know that the aunt and nephew are soon to engage in the act of darkness.
Life starts falling apart, as Terry’s car keeps disappearing and reappearing; Valerie’s roommate Lorna (Judy Matheson) — who also sleeps nude with her pet monkey — is assaulted and killed, an old man with pigeons moves in downstairs and when she heads out of town to meet with Paul again, she realizes that his house is the same abandoned house she’s been in before thanks to the strange taxidermy inside. Seriously, if you go on a date and someone has a lot of taxidermy, please run.
There, she finds the bodies of those missing, and Paul’s aunt appears and demands that he kill Valerie. He responds by stabbing her as our heroine runs outside screaming, directly into the police, while Paul just sits in the void.
Larraz comes from Spain to England to make movies that seem like they’re from Italy that have their origins in Germany and England. If that doesn’t make you look at his movies, then I have no hope for you.
You’ve never seen more! Let us prove it to you when the monsters meet the girls! The nudies meet the nasties! No monster ever had it so good! See Frankenstein do the twist with Miss Hollywood! The gayest girlie spree of all time! Everything’s off when the horror boys meet Granny Good’s girls! The biggest bevy of beauties ever laid before your eyes! For adults only!
Get ready for 62 minutes of sheer wildness as directed by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. If you wonder, with scumbags — and I say that term with the utmost of respect, admiration and love — like this were at the wheel, how far away was Harry Novak? Oh, he was there. He was there.
Granny Good’s School for Good Girls is really a front for girls to get naked and make booze for Granny Good, who is played by producer Bob Cresse. She also employs a werewolf named Krakow. Yes. A werewolf. And when the girls throw a party, that’s when Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster show up.
Ann Perry, who plays Sally in this, was originally going to be a nun before she met her first husband, Ron Myers. After starting her career in Cresse’s softcore films, she moved into hardcore and started her own production company, Evolution Enterprises, in the 1970’s, becoming one of the only women to write, direct, and produce her own hardcore movies. She was also the first female president of the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA).
The adult films of 1962 are incredibly odd affairs today, featuring little to no sex and mostly women taking off their clothes and doing things like reading topless. I find them incredibly charming, almost time capsules of a more innocent time, a place where small movies like this could find an audience of raincoaters who found something, anything erotic in what we would now see as just plain silly.
Because of strict censorship laws, these films often featured “nudist colony” logic. People could be naked, but they couldn’t be doing anything. This led to topless reading or a werewolf watching girls dance.
Sadly for Frost and Cresse, the advent of hardcore would put an end to their films. Then again, Frost would go on to produce and direct one of the oddest — and roughest — films of the golden age of adult films, A Climax of Blue Power. He kept working right up until 1995’s direct-to-video softcore thriller Private Obsession. I’d also recommend his mondo films Witchcraft ’70and Mondo Bizarro. Oh yeah! He also directed The Thing With Two Heads and The Black Gestapo. He also made Love Camp Seven, which features Cresse as the commander of a German prison camp. Wow. I know more about Lee Frost than some members of my family.
You can download this on the Internet Archive. Even better, Nicolas Winding Refn’s ByNWR site has a fully cleaned-up version straight from the director’s archive. Man, I want to sit down and talk to that dude someday.
Directed, written, produced, starring and edited by Mark Polonia, this movie makes Carnosaur look like a 5D CGI spectacle by comparison, but come on. It was shot by a teenager in Pennsylvania and has the energy that that statement embodies.
I mean, what’s your tolerance for stop motion dinosaurs on green screen and Amiga graphics? You’re either the kind of person that looks at this and thinks it’s complete junk or you get obsessed and can’t turn away. There’s really no in-between. You know what side I end up on, because I’ve seen so many Polonia films, like the sequel to this, Saurians 2. Hell, I even have a signed copy.
Explosions wake up two dinosaurs, who proceed to destroy most of Mark’s hometown, Wellsboro, PA. It looks like this movie is all him and not as much of his brother John, who does show up as an extra. And Mark cares about you, his audience, so much that he even has his future wife do a shower scene.
This isn’t just low budget; it’s using the family camcorder and a dream budget. The stop-motion dinosaurs don’t just look rubbery—they look like they were unearthed from a discount bin at a 1980s Kay-Bee Toys and brought to life through sheer stubbornness.
The stakes in Saurians are hilariously localized. Most disaster movies threaten New York or London; Mark Polonia threatens the local diner and his neighbors’ backyards. The explosions that wake the beasts feel like someone set off a pack of Black Cat firecrackers behind a bush, yet the characters react like it’s the end of days.
And that’s beautiful.
Extras include commentary with director Mark Polonia, moderated by the Visual Vengeance crew; The Making of Saurians; a locations visit; interviews with Todd Carpenter and Kevin Lindenmuth; stop motion outtakes; Super 8 raw footage; the alternate, never released Rae Don Home Video version of Saurians; bonus SOV feature film The Dinosaur Chronicles; a commentary track for Rae Don version with director Mark Polonia and the Visual Vengeance crew; Visual Vengeance trailers; a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set; a reversible sleeve featuring original Saurians VHS art; a folded mini-poster with alternate vintage promotional art; a limited edition O-Card and a rare, original piece of Super-8 film from the movie! You can get this from MVD.
Shot on Super 8, this film tells the story of PR exec Jim Matthews (David Rommel) as he tries to leave his wife, genetic designer Meredith Weaver (Anna Zizzo), for his secretary, Jenny Dole (Joan Dinco). His wife doses him with her latest experiment, which causes his extremities to start thinking on their own and destroy his mind. Yes, his hands, his arms, his legs, even his cock, all can move away from his body to kill and feed, kind of like a demented version of the Myron Fass Captain Marvel that split into different parts.
The core of the film’s horror isn’t just the gore. It’s the loss of agency. Jim is a man defined by his lack of impulse control; he can’t keep his hands off his secretary, so his wife ensures he literally cannot keep his hands on his body.
Directed and written by Tom Berna (his only film; however, he has acted and provided special effects for several others), Colony Mutation features great acting from Rommel, and the relationship between Meredith and her sister Suzanne (Susan L. Cane) feels authentic. How strange that a body horror film is mainly about the human emotions of a marriage being destroyed and a woman falling in love with a man who is already taken.
Shot on Super 8 in Milwaukee, the film carries that specific Midwestern gloom. The grain of the film stock acts as a veil, making the beyond microbudget effects feel like something you weren’t supposed to see, almost like snuff-adjacent glimpses of a body coming undone.
Where else would you get a movie with a killer penis and a man who no longer can control his body because he couldn’t control his body? Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was far from Hollywood, and films made like this were the last bastion of what regional filmmaking was: grimy, rough blasts of unreality that infect our brains.
Colony Mutation: This has a new, director supervised 2K transfer and restoration from original Super 8 film elements; commentary from producer/director Tom Berna and a second commentary from Tony Strauss of Weng’s Chop Magazine; interviews with Berna, star David Rommel and music composer Patrick Nettesheim; an archival public access interview with Tom Berna; alternate VHS and DVD cuts; the original script; an image gallery; a teaser trailer; stick your own VHS stickers; a booklet with liner notes by Tony Strauss; a poster and a limited edition O-Card with art by Justin Coons. You can get this from MVD.
Originally shot in 3D for the Sterling’s Ultimate 3D Heaven, this Jeff Leroy-directed opus spent years in limbo before being rescued from the digital ether by Visual Vengeance. It’s exactly the kind of unhinged, DIY spectacle the label was built for.
It has everything you want in a movie, and by that, I mean effects Leroy-style, male genital mutilation and nearly constant nude scenes.
And if you don’t want that, why are you even here?
The carnage kicks off in a stylized 1950s prologue. We meet Eva (Nicole Laino) and her husband Ward (Robert Rhine), a couple who make the fatal mistake of playing Good Samaritan to a seemingly ill woman (Kelly Erin Decker). That woman is a vampire — yes, that’s how we get to the sorority — and the ensuing chaos leaves Ward dead and Eva infected. In a moment of grisly desperation, witnessed by her young daughter, Eva is forced to feast on her own husband’s remains to survive.
Fast-forward to the present day, and get ready to meet a full-blown sorority of the damned. Annabel (Missy Martinez) and Scarlet (Jacqueline Fae) are the veteran sisters who spend their nights luring unsuspecting men back to their lair, where they drain them.
Their blood. Not their balls. Come on, people.
Eva, now the matriarch, is hunting for the “chosen one” among her new pledges. Enter Holly (Alejandra Morin) and Lilith (Antoinette Mia Pettis). Holly possesses a rare blood type that promises an evolutionary leap for the vampire race, but the rank-and-file sorority girls have more… immediate interests like using the electric spark of a dying man’s soul as a metaphysical masturbatory aid.
This was shot for 3D, so in addition to the Leroy effects you hoped for, there are also moments where the stakes come right at the camera. It’s really magical.
Directed by John Duncan, who also made Black River Monster, The Hackers is a Michigan SOV by way of rednecksploitation that is all about the Hacker family: Pa (Howard Coburn), his sons Arnie (Dale Caughel) and Eldon Junior (Steve Prichard), who already cut off most of his face with a chainsaw, so he wears a mask. You may watch this and wonder, ” Am I watching a cosplay Sawyer family? You sure are. But the actors are all in, so let’s go for it too.
The film’s pacing is a strange, hypnotic slurry. In between unsettling trips to a local playground, the Hackers operate a makeshift handyman service. Their business model is simple: if the invoice isn’t settled, the client is liquidated. The body count swells with disgruntled employers, unlucky hitchhikers, and a local farmer who ends up a grisly piece of outdoor decor. Just as the viewer begins to wonder if there’s a narrative compass, the plot arrives in the form of Marcie (Michelle Rank). Dispatched by her boss to oversee roof repairs on a summer home, she brings her sister Angelia (Denise Ferris) along for a getaway that quickly sours.
It also has some fishing.
I’ve done the kind of work the Hackers do, and I feel some catharsis watching this, imagining getting people back for shortening my day by slicing them to pieces. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and it’s all that is good and warm about SOV.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.