Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is haunted by the ghost of killing machine Hideo (Masanori Mimoto), who wants her help in getting revenge on the people who killed him.
Simple concept, but incredible execution here.
It’s made by the Baby Assassins trilogy team of director Kensuke Sonomura and writer Yugo Sakamoto, working on a tight budget but delivering big action-packed martial arts and gunplay action.
When Fumika and Hideo join hands, he can take over her body, using her more frail form to do the murderous mayhem that he does so well. Kudo also learns from her that perhaps killing wasn’t all that life should have been about.
Sonomura has directed the action and created stunts for so many movies, like Bad City, the Resident Evil games, Deadball, Black Rat, The Machine Girland so many more.
If this was the 2000s, this movie would be bought by Miramax and remade with inferior action. Today, we’re lucky to get to see it almost in the same time period as its home audience.
Kati Kelli was a YouTube personality as the form moved from people just posting anything to today’s world of content providers. In this collection of her movies, made by Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) and husband Jordan Whipple, we see the many faces that she put on online before dying in 2019 from a severe asthma attack.
You can see the original videos on her channel, Girl Internet Show, or watch this movie to see Kelli direct, write, edit and star in a series of films where her only other co-stars are animations. The last movie in this, Total Body Removal Surgery, was posted three days before her death.
In 79 minutes, we see where the internet was and where it was going, this film has so explorations by its star of beauty, image and online and offline personality. The internet has changed so much in the years since Kelli’s death but from this film, you get the idea that she would have transformed beyond it and led it somewhere.
In 1998, the Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon. Since then, it has seen 50,000 visitors every October, even 25 years later. Yet just like the town in the series of Disney films — Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Halloweentown Highand Return to Halloweentown — the locals believe that there are real hauntings. And beyond that, like any small town, there’s plenty of gossip to listen to.
Directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, this is a film that feels like a real life Waiting for Guffman. There’s a zombie dance being choreographed by a girl who had to drop out of dance and who wants to reconnect with her father. A newcomer to the town has bought a favorite restaurant, the Klondike Tavern, and his social media mistake causes his entire staff to mutiny. A woman claims to the town council that she is being attacked in her dreams and that the town is becoming possessed by demons. And there’s also a team of paranormal investigators investigating the hauntings that they claim are real.
This film never makes fun of its subjects, instead allowing them to tell their stories. I absolutely loved this and have been raving about it to everyone I can, as it’s a perfect non-spooky way to get yourself ready for the Halloween season. Here’s hoping it finds a streaming home soon so more people can enjoy this fun hangout in a town that has embraced its history as a spooky location.
Ozzie Gray (Asya Meadows) has been investigating her mental health and the reasons why when she remembers that her grandmother attacked her when she was just a child. This is all told in a found footage style that brings together video diaries, security camera footage, home movies, video chats with a therapist and more.
Dorothy Bell (Arlene Arnone Bibbs) is long missing, but the damage she did lives on and so does the urban legend that she haunts the library where she once worked. Ozzie tries to work out the past with her therapist Dr. Robin Connelly (Lisa Wilcox, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child) and her father Darren (Michael Hargrove, Candyman).
Director and writer Danny Villaneuva Jr. has put together quite the puzzle here, even if this feels like a short that could have been kept a short. I really liked his movie I Dream of Psychopomp and this is an interesting watch that does more to prove his talent and make me hope for something even better next time.
Some advice for you. If you grandmother ever tried to stab you as a child and is now a ghost in a library, don’t buy her old house, no matter how cheap it is in today’s housing market.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Vampire’s Coffin was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 3, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, July 12, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.
The Vampire’s Coffin is the sequel to El Vampiro, a movie that brought Universal monsters to Mexico and created a new species of vampires.
A graverobber named Manson (Yerye Beirute) has been hired by Dr. Marion to take the coffin of Conde Karol de Lavud (German Robles) back to the hospital, the very place where Marta (Carlos Ancira), the heroine of the first movie, is being nursed back to health by her boyfriend Dr. Enrique (Abel Salazar). As she recovers, he follows her to the theater where she’s working on her dance career, all with the aim of possessing her forever.
How many movies will you see where a vampire makes a wax museum his lair? This one. Beyond having a basement with functional torture implements, Conde Karol de Lavud also has time to act as this movie’s Phantom of the Opera.
Beyond acting in this, Salazar wrote the script with Ramon Obon and Raul Zenteno. Director Fernando Méndez made both of this and the original film.
When this played in the U.S., there was a smiling skull-and-crossbones logo on the posters and lobby cards stating that The Vampire’s Coffin was “Recommended by Young America Horror Club.” This club did not exist and was invented by K. Gordon Murray in a strange shot at selling tickets.
I love the moment that someone puts a mirror up to the vampire’s face, he looks into it and just sees a skull. That’s cinema.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Boogie Man Will Get You was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 9, 1966 at 1 a.m. and Saturday, March 8, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.
The last movie Karloff made under his contract with Columbia Pictures and filmed in after his success in the 1941 Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace, this is the last of the Columbia Karloff as mad scientist films and is a comedy version of that story. It was directed by Lew Landers (The Return of the Vampire, Terrified) and written by Edwin Blum (who in addition to a writing career that stretched from 1935’s The New Adventures of Tarzan all the way to 1986’s Gung Ho — with stops in-between including Stalag 17 and episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The New People — as well as being the scriptwriter who came up with the nickname Tricky Dick for Richard Nixon), based on a story by Hal Fimberg and Robert B. Hunt.
Karloff is Professor Nathaniel Billings, a scientist who has fallen behind on his mortgage. He sells his gigantic home to Winnie Layden (Miss Jeff Donnell, who took her first name from the comic strip Mutt and Jeff; she played Gidget’s mom and housekeeper Stella Fields on General Hospital) who decides to pull off that The Beyond plan of turning a place filled with dead bodies into a hotel. She also hires Billings’ staff, housekeeper Amelia Jones (Maude Eburne) and maintenance man Ebenezer (George McKay), all while ignoring that he’s growing superhumans for the war effort.
Winnie’s ex-husband Bill (Larry Parks) wants her to reconsider the sale — pretty wild to have a divorced couple in a Hayes Code movie — so he explores the house, finds the bodies and tries to get the law involved in the form of sheriff Dr. Arthur Lorentz (Peter Lorre), who promptly starts working with Professor Billings and using a traveling powder puff salesman (former NYSAC, NBA and The Ring light heavyweight champion Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom). Then everyone learns another murderer is in the hotel as well as a potential German agent.
It’s no Arsenic and Old Lace, but it certainly tries to make you think that it’s exactly that movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Day the World Ended was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 12, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. and Saturday, May 14, 1966 at 11:20 p.m.
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, this movie somehow had newsman Chet Huntley as its narrator and tells the story of the end of the world and the mutant monster that comes afterward.
U.S. Navy Commander Jim Maddison and his daughter Louise have somehow survived all the atomic bombs, a uranium miner named Rick, a gangster named Tony and his girl Ruby (Adele Jergens, who was an understudy of Gypsy Rose Lee).
Between the creature on the loose, Tony being a jerk and radioactive fallout, how will anyone make it to the end of this movie alive? Well, you will learn a new science fact in this movie: rain can wash away radiation.
Larry Buchanan remade this movie, using almost all the same dialogue, as In the Year 2889 in 1967.
A nine day wonder with a foam rubber monster, this got its name from future American-International Pictures boss James H. Nicholson before it was even filmed. It was Corman’s fourth film and played on a double bill with The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues.
4. FAMILY MATTERS: It takes a family to raise this village.
Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) has figured out how to get his patients to get rid of mental illness through changing their bodies by psychoplasmics. It sounds ridiculous but it works and its helping Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), a woman in a battle with her husband Frank (Art Hindle) over their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). Something weird is happening, though, as Frank keeps finding scratches all over his little girl, so Raglan intensifies his techniques to help Nola get custody. That’s when he discovers that eureka moment that some therapists believe is behind every psychosis. Nole was abused by her mother (Nuala Fitzgerald) and ignored by her father (Henry Beckman).
A past patient, Jan Hartog (Robert A. Silverman), tells Frank that the treatments have given him lymphoma. While learning more, he’s left his daughter with his wife’s mother, who is soon killed by something…small. And Candice watches the whole thing. After the same thing kills Nola’s father, Frank kills it, revealing an aesexual toothless man-child. Worse, even with Raglan’s institute closing, now Nola commands an army of these creatures.
David Cronenberg said, “The Brood is my version of Kramer vs. Kramer, but more realistic.” He was going through a divorce and even cast Hindle and Eggar as they looked like him and his ex-wife. Eggar went all out, even cleaning one of the strange children after it was born, saying “I just thought that when cats have their kittens or dogs have puppies (and I think at that time I had about 8 dogs), they lick them as soon as they’re born. Lick, lick, lick, lick, lick…”
As for the critics, Leonard Maltin said, “Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!” and rated it an outright “BOMB.”” Roger Ebert said, ” “Are there really people who want to see reprehensible trash like this?” And Vaughn Palmer stated, “The people who made The Brood do not like people. They do not even appear to like themselves. They just like money.”
Man, what were those guys watching? While I know this is in no way a comfortable watch, it feels like it came from Cronenberg’s heart and soul. I mean, as much as any movie with killer genderless miniature people murdering a teacher in front of her class can be.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Birth year
The Legend of the Tamal Moon informs a bunch of hippies that the longer they stay, the greater the chance that a Headless Horseman, searching forever for eight gunfighters, will appear to them all. But hey, Mark (Marland Proctor) inherited this place from his Uncle Callahan and has six months to make it profitable, so he gathers up all his pals and they decide to put on wild west shows because we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise. If he fails, Solomon the Caretaker (B.G. Fisher), who is at once the old man who warns everyone and kind of the Scooby-Doo villain, will get the ranch.
“It is beginning again. It is beginning again. It is beginning again. The story will be told but non-believers…are doomed.”
This is a film that teaches us that pizza is the nectar of the gods, a narrator that says things like “Remember childhood innocence and freedom? Remember it, for it is gone now,” a hippie girls freaking out very very badly on acid and the day for night having its own freakout along with her, a sexual assault soundtracked by a cover of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” improv theater, the blood drinking Baroness Isabelle Collin Dufresne who shows up with a Superman lunchbox and holy cow, that’s Factory Superstar Ultra Violet, that same hippie girl being attacked by the Headless Horseman who swings his own head at her which covers her in blood while she seemingly has an orgasm and, at the risk of making this more of a run-on sentence, an amazing twist to the ending.
Director John Kirkland would also make Pornography In Hollywood, while writer Kenn Riche only made this. It’s a mess, but a wonderful one, a movie that starts stupid, gets stupider and then gives you moments of artistic brilliance and you wonder, “How did we get here?”
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.
I love the guys at Wild Eye. After reading our Letterboxd list of Amityville movies*, I got an email from them that said, “Have you seen Amityville Island yet?”
Look, when a movie has the tagline “For God’s sake, get out of the water!” you know I’m probably going to have to watch it. Throw in the fact that it was directed by Mark Polonia (along with Paul Alan Steele) and I knew I was going to be spinning this, probably while my wife was asleep so that she didn’t cast a gaze at me that said, “You really will watch anything if Amityville is in the title.”
Several girls are brought to a small island where they are subjected to genetic experiments that involve both humans and animals. Right away, we have a women in prison, a science gone wild story and a government conspiracy flick all at the same time, but to complete this buffet, we learn that one of the girls killed people inside the house on 112 Ocean Avenue.
Perhaps the finest movie to ever be made for $30,000 in Wellsboro, PA, Amityville Shark succeeds just because it exists. It’s packed with a CGI shark, CGI blood, stock footage, a possessed woman blasting a dude through his PC and lines like, “She’s from Amityville, what are you gonna do?” and “High quality dirtbags are getting harder and harder to find.”
Oh yeah — there’s also a zombie that shows up before the end of this movie.
Of course there is.
You know, if we put low budget filmmakers in charge of solving COVID-19, I bet their ingenuity and ability to work with no money would solve it in no time. Or maybe we’d have female prisoners fighting in basements while random dudes in officers yell into their landlines. Either way, this time, we can all win.
I hope Mark Polonia reads this and hears my request: Please make a movie where the apes from Empire of the Apes ride sharks.
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