The bachelorette party has become dangerous in the horror films of the 2020s. It seems that every time ladies get together, people die. I was excited about watching this because it was directed by Dave Parker, who made The Dead Hate the Living!

Kelsey (Diana Gardner), Rochelle (Isabella Egizi), Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach) and Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach) are in Italy to celebrate Rochelle’s wedding to Richard (Davide Nurra). One of their friends, Brianna (Giulia Nunnari), has already been killed by a vampire but they don’t know that. No, they’re here to party, even if Kelsey and Rochelle aren’t really all that good of friends these days — which seems like a bit taken from Bridesmaids, but taken even darker because Rochelle stole Kelsey’s man, who is Richard. We also find out later that she may like Kelsey even more than Richard, however.

Everyone goes out and ends up a club owned by Victor (Fabián Castro). He asks to be invited back to where the party is happening and brings his vampire clan to start killing everyone, as well as try and win over Kelsey, who of course looks like his long dead love.

Written by Michael Lucid and Mary O’Neil (who is in Malum), this has some fine gore, gay representation — even Blake gets a love interest in vampire killer Dario (Riccardo Angelini) and some great production values. Is it the best vampire movie you’ve ever seen? Of course not. Is it a great movie for a rainy afternoon or late night with some drinks and pizza? Totally.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Maddie (Alexa Barajas) is driving when she gets distracted and hits someone. Instead of staying to check on them, she runs. Her mother is a politician and decides to hide her, more for her career than for Maddie’s safety. Her friend Hertig (Pavel Kríz) has created a state-of-the-art AI-powered house that has a system called ROMI (Jocelyn Chugg) that was created by Barkley (Juan Riedinger).

While hiding out, Maddie smokes weed, drinks and pops pills, showing no remorse at all for nearly killing someone. She does, however, learn that Hertig once had another woman living in the house named Irina (Jamie Shelnitz). That’s when the movie throws you a curve while otherwise it had been setting itself up to be an AI versus human beings film. It now is about a lost soul trapped in the house as well as a woman-hating serial killer coming after Maddie.

Director Robert Cuffley and writer Susie Moloney made a short of this film in 2019. There are some interesting shots in this as well as a really cool red color palette for some scenes, but there isn’t much that will surprise you. Cuffley also made Bright Hill Road, which has a similar story of a female protagonist confronting her past through the supernatural.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The third sequel to Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, this film finds Ilsa — didn’t she die a few times along the way? — changing sides from the Third Reich to the USSR as she runs Siberian Gulag 14, where she mentally and physically decimates men.

When Stalin dies, Ilsa burns the camp to the ground leaving no one alive except for Andrei Chikurin, who escapes and vows to get revenge. Twenty years later, he learns that Isla now runs a brothel in Canada when the Russian hockey team plays several games there.

According to the amazing Canuxploitation, Ilsa is actually a Canadian creation. When Lee Frost and David F. Friedman made big money with Love Camp 7 in Canada, Cinepix’s Andr Link and John Dunning wrote the script for Ilsa and got Friedman on board as a producer. Despite being the man who hired Dyanne Thorne for the role, issues with Cinepix and producer Don Carmody would have Friedman disown the movie.

Amazingly, this was produced by Ivan Reitman (using the name Julian Parnell).

This movie has a Siberian tiger named Sasha that Ilsa feeds men to, as well as many icy and watery graves and a scene where men arm wrestle over a running chainsaw. And each night, the men wrestle one another while a nude Ilsa challenges them to be the only two to come to her room where she’s definitely ahead of the adult film curve and very into DP (and I thought that was popularized by Ginger Lynn). She also has a mad scientist named Leve who has figured out ways to use photos and music to get into people’s brains.

Andrei Chikurin (Michel Morin) is the one man that she can’t break. He’s the one who killed her tiger and escaped the gulag and now, as the manager of the Russian hockey team, he somehow finds the one Montreal bordello called Aphrodite that Ilsa is the boss of. As he sits in the waiting room, her men take him and she tries to break him again — and make love to him, of course — before he’s freed by the Russian mafia and all manner of near Eurospy wildness goes down.

Director Jean LaFleur also made The Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck which has a lot of footage that was taken for this movie. It’s in no way as insane as the other Ilsa films — I mean, they have to contend with Jess Franco’s insane Ilsa, The Wicked Warden — but there’s lots of silly fun to be had. There’s also the ending, where Ilsa is left in the midst of nowhere, left with just her money to burn to stay alive.

If you thought that Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS was the limit, this movie makes it feel as if Jess Franco tool that movie as a personal challenge to somehow create something innumerable times sleazier.

Considered the third movie in the series — even if it wasn’t filmed as a sequel — and also known as Greta, the Mad Butcher, Ilsa: Absolute Power and Wanda, the Wicked Warden, this stars the women who is Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne, as Greta. She’s running a psychiatric hospital for young women, which gives her plenty of opportunities to indulge her more, shall we say, psychosexual side.

Probably shot at the same time — who knows, maybe even the same place — as Barbed Wire Dolls, the heroine of this story is Abbie Phillips, whose sister died inside the walls of Greta’s hospital, and now must infiltrate the hospital and find out why.

The amazing thing about this movie is that as wild as Ilsa has been in the past, she’s now entering the ninth circle of voyeur hell where director Jess Franco and his muse, Lina Romay, reside. Lina plays a prisoner named Juana who keeps the other female prisoners in line as well as lined up for prostitution and pornography. Also, in one scene that might break your mind, she follows a prison toilet BM by forcing Abbie to be human toilet paper. Yes, this happens and yes, this movie played American theaters and I have no idea how.

Snuff movies, acupuncture gone wrong, scarred women being used by cruel men, Lina Romay no doubt looking as perfect as she ever will or ever did and being the meanest woman in the world in a manner so brutal that she can only devour — literally — the previous champion in an ending that is either going to flip your stomach, raise your fist in triumph or both and Franco pretty much running through the motions he did in so many other women in prison movies, except Franco through the motions is still way more magical and insane and upsetting and sleazy and can you endure this than anyone perhaps ever.

José Ramón Larraz went to school for philosophy, became a comic book writer and then made some wild movies, like Whirlpool, which Roger Ebert negatively reviewed — I mean, I love it — by saying that it was a genuinely sickening film. It has to do with various varieties of sex, yes, but its main appeal seems to be its violence… The violence is not, however, the cathartic sort to be found in The Wild Bunch or the comic strip spaghetti Westerns. It’s a particularly grisly sort of violence, photographed for its own sake and deliberately relishing in its ugliness. It made me awfully uneasy.” He also directed the Spanish Western Watch Out Gringo! Sabata Will Return, The House That Vanished (which had so many titles, including Scream…And Die! and Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, as well as a campaign that made it look like Last House on the Left), Symptoms, Stigma, Black Candles (AKA Sex Rites of the Devil) and three American co-productions before the end of his career, the underrated Edge of the Axe, Rest in Pieces and Deadly Manor.

The film starts with its leads, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska, billed here as Anulka; a former Page 3 girl who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1973, she was once married to Soupy Sales’ son Tony, who was in Tin Machine with David Bowie, Reeves Gabriels and his brother Hunt Sales) in bed together, which was probably quite shocking in 1974, but perhaps even more shocking is when they’re machine gunned before the credits.

They’re brought back as vampires that roam the British countryside and take in wayward male motorists, draining them of more than blood before disposing of these conquests. They have a different form of vampirism than you may have seen before, making grisly arm wounds that they continually feed from, closer to cannibals than bloodsuckers.

Morris and Anulka make quite the pair; the film is in love with everything they do. Beyond the gorgeous leads, the scenery is just as inviting, as this was not around Oakley Court, which Hammer used for The Man in Black, The Lady Craved Excitement, The Brides of Dracula, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies. William Castle shot The Old Dark House there and you’ll also see it in films like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly; And Now the Screaming Starts! and perhaps most famously, it was the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it had no heat or running water when that movie was filmed, it’s now a luxury hotel.

This played double features with The Devil’s Rain! in England, which is my kind of night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Yes, Ilsa died at the end of the first movie but when has that ever stopped a sequel?

Directed again by Don Edmonds, written by Langston Stafford and again featuring Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, this film starts with three crates arriving for Ilsa to process. They three chastity belt-confined women. They are the sole heiress of a chain store king of the United States, an actress who is a Scandinavian love goddess and an Asian-European equestrian champion. Working for Sheikh El-Sharif (Jerry Delony), she is to prepare them for sale, which means forcing them to make love to her lesbian bodyguards and crush the body parts of spies who are working for the American commander (Max Thayer) who is spying on her.

This is a movie that has exploding diaphragms and belly button cameras, so it is much more Eurospy than the original. It is just as ridiculous. It also steals the theme from Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.

It also has a formidable cast, including Russ Meyer supervixens Uschi Digard  and Haji, Tanya Boyd, Colleen Brennan, Marilyn Joi, Su Ling and the returning George Buck Flower. There’s also a plot where the commander and Ilsa save the prince and she still gets condemned to starvation. Don’t worry. She’ll be back.

This is a much slicker looking movie with cardboard sets but somehow, it has more of a spirit of fun, even if it has dialogue like “Let’s see how she dances with no feet.”

Don Edmonds and produced by David F. Friedman, Ilsa is one of the most notorious exploitation movies of all time. Gene Siskel said it was “the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown” and people were shocked by its depictions of castration, torture, human experiments and sexual degradation. Of course, it was a huge success.

Based on Ilse Koch, a woman who ran the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she supposedly killed some prisoners to get their tattooed skin. Even if time — and court cases — have proved that she was not as horrible as those claims, the legend stuck.

She did not, however, look anything like Dyanne Thorne. The actress went from the stage and comedy albums in New York City to singing in Las Vegas and acting in movies like Point of Terror. She was also a church ordained, non-denominational ministers of a church called the Science of Mind. Later in life — she also studied anthropology — Thorne and husband Howard Mauer offered weddings in Las Vegas. She would even dress like Ilsa if you wanted.

Ilsa runs a prison camp and also uses it for her sexual needs, which can’t be satisfied by any man. When any of them orgasm before her, they lose their manhood and are killed. The only man that survives her bedroom is Wolfe (Gregory Knoph), who looks like the perfect Aryan Ubermensch. He will be, however, her undoing.

Meanwhile, a visiting German general gives Ilsa the Iron Cross for her service as she proves that women are superior when it comes to dealing with pain. He also asks her to urinate on him, so…yeah. You may not be ready for this movie, to be perfectly honest.

The other reason this movie works is a great cast. There’s George Buck Flower as Dr. Binz, Ilsa’s assistant doctor. He was also an uncredited assistant director, casting director, set decorator and grip. It also has appearances by Uschi Digard, Colleen Brennan (AKA Sharon Kelly; she’s also in the first sequel) and Sandy Dempsey.

Ilsa comes after Lee Frost and Friedman’s Love Camp 7 became a success in Canada, which found André Link and John Dunning of Cinepix Film Properties wanting to make their own cash-in. There were some worries that this movie would backfire, so it starts with a square-up: “The film you are about to see is based on documented Holocaust facts. The atrocities shown were conducted as medical experiments in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although the Nazis and Schutzstaffel’s crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous, absolutely HORRIFIC crimes will never happen again.”

It also has its share of fake names. Herman Traeger is Friedman, Jonah Royston is Saxton, Flower used C.D. Lafleuer and Richard Kennedy was Wolfgang Roehm. The editor had to have used a fake name, as Kurt Schnit means “short cut” in German.

Despite — spoiler warning — Ilsa being shot in the head and her crimes being covered up, she somehow survived and appears in three sequels that all also end with her being killed or near-death.

Most incredibly, this was shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes, which had been cancelled and was due to be toen down. The filmmakers told them they would be destroying it, which got them the use of the entire pre-built world that appears so much more sinister than it did when Colonel Klink was running things.

Phil Tucker invented a rotary engine known as the CT Surge Turbine that he successfully patented and unsuccessfully tried to sell to the automobile industry as a more efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine. And years after directing movies like this and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, he did actually contribute to some movies as an editor, including Orca and King Kong.

Yet we’re all going to remember him for this movie and to be honest, whenever life gets me down, I remember that at some point, people got together and decided to make a movie about the end of the world and threw a monkey suit with a TV set for a head in it and I think about the startling ridiculousness of that and you know, it’s all better.

That monster is known as Ro-Man Extension XJ-2. He’s played by George Barrows, who made his own gorilla suit to get roles in movies. He’s already used his Calcinator death ray to kill everyone on Earth except for the eight people we meet in this movie.

I mean, that’s pretty through. There were 2.6 billion people alive in 1953, so to wipe out that many people, much less be able to find the eight you missed is pretty good work, if I can commend the outright annihilation of a planet.

Sure, this movie outright rips off the ending of Invaders from Mars and recycles footage from One Million B.C., Lost Continent, Rocketship X-M and Captive Women, but it’s in 3D, shot all over Bronson Canyon and was made in four days for $16,000. That is also worth celebrating.

It also has a score by Elmer Bernstein, who was currently being held back from major movies because of his liberal views. He also did a score for Cat Women of the Moon that year, but soon would be one of the biggest names in movie music.

Look, this is a movie that has a Billion Bubble Machine with an antenna being used for Ro-Man to communicate with the Great Guidance, the supreme leader of his face, who finally gets fed up and blasts not only that gorilla robot but the child hero before he causes dinosaurs to come back and then uses psychotronic vibrations to smash Earth out of the universe. If you can’t find something to love there, you are beyond hope.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater and original version of this movie on Tubi.

Directed, written and produced by Herbert J. Leder, this is all about Nazi scientist Dr. Norberg (Dana Andrews), who has taken over an English estate and is unfreezing soldiers that have been iced up for twenty years. What he gets are zombies like his brother (Edward Fox) and Elsa (Kathleen Breck), the best friend of his niece Jean (Anna Palk), who is now a living head. His commanding officers General Lubeck (Karel Stepanek) and Captain Tirptiz (Basil Henson) have been told he’s doing a great job but all he can freeze is the body and not the brain. He brings in American scientist Ted Roberts (Philip Gilbert) to help him, a man who is not aware that there are 1,500 frozen soldiers all over the world.

How did that smart man come in, see a wall of arms and a decapitated female head that is still alive and think, “Everything seems totally fine.”

Although The Frozen Dead was shot and released in UK theaters and on U.S. TV in color, the U.S. theatrical release prints of it were released in black-and-white in order to save money. It played double features with another Leder movie, It! 

This is not the first movie I have seen where a disembodied female head just wants to die.

Made at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort in Lutz, Florida, this is all about J. Randolph Latimore (R. G. Armstrong), his daughter-in-law Susan (Jamie O’Hara) and his granddaughter (Karen Sue Trent) coming to terms with the death of his son and her falling in love with Johnny Patterson (Mickey Knox) as well as the elder man coming to grips with the growing need for people to be nude in public.

While this film seems silly today, it was part of a court case, Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents. The New York State Court of Appeals ruled that onscreen nudity was not obscene and this movie is why others can depict nakedness on screen. Everyone in this is a nudist by the end. In movies like this, if you had a nude woman appear at a nudist camp, it was legal. Anywhere else she was naked, it wasn’t. That’s why there were so many of these films.

Director and co-writer Max Nosseck always seemed to make exploitation in the U.S. like Dillinger — starring Lawrence Tierney and written by William Castle and Philip Yordan — as well as Girls Under 21. Then again, he also made The Return of Rin Tin Tin.

Nudist camp movies may seem goofy and perhaps even boring today. When this debuted in Tampa, a 20 year old woman wasn’t allowed in to see it, as she was too young. She was in the movie, so she was old enough to be nude at a camp.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.