VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Bloodsuckers from Outer Space (1984)

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Newspaper photographer Jeff Rhodes (Thom Meyers) has found that the people of a small Texas town are all drained of all of their blood. He’s on a deadline — Uncle Joe (Robert Bradeen) and Aunt Kate (Billie Keller) demand that he quit his job and come back to the family farm — while his brother Ralph (played by director and writer Roger Coburn) is a successful scientist at Research City. He also knows that alien life forms have come to Earth to bring dead bodies back to life and seek blood. If Jeff can stop the bedroom rodeo with Julie (Laura Ellis) he just might save the world if General Sanders (Dennis Letts) doesn’t nuke everyone first.

Bloodsuckers from Outer Space is aware that it’s a bad movie and leans into it, yet in the scenes where the aliens describe being dead and how Jeff will soon join them, the dialogue is actually pretty incredible. If only it went that way and became a Texas-based Messiah of Evil.

After running for President every year between 1968 and 1996, Pat Paulsen gets to be the leader of the United States in this movie and like almost everyone else, he’s busier having sex than doing something.

This had its first showing at Joe Bob Briggs’ 3rd Annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Custom Car Rally in 1984 — Paulsen was chaffed by how bad it looked — and even came out on VHS by a major company, Karl-Lorimar Home Video.

Coburn was also one of the directors of Tabloid.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Storm of the Dead (2006)

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After Hurricane Xiora, the empowered Florida militia shoots a looter who has run into the swamps after he kills two of their men. Sergeant Barnes (Todd Terry) shoots him and learns that he was stealing diapers and baby food, just in time for the man’s voodoo grandmother (Yvone Williamson) to snap his neck.

Lieutenant Hutchinson (J. Todd Smith) and his unit are sent to find Barnes. He’s conflicted, as he joined to honor the memory of his father, who died in Desert Storm. He’s also not so sure that as a black man he should be ordering white men to shoot black people no matter what they’re doing.

Joined by weather reporter Lisa Hicks (Karin Justman) — yes, that happens in this movie — the unit finds two survivors who just so happens to be voodoo slaves to the grandmother.

Directed and written by Bob Cook (Rock-A-Die BabyAnimals), this has people wandering a swamp for most of the movie and delivers its one zombie quite late in the film. My favorite character was Corporal Dani Stevens (Debra Cassano), who ends up tongue kissing one of the privates by force in the bar and laughing at him. She got kicked out of the Marines for attacking her commander and is only in the militia to make her dad happy. Cassano is really good in the part and stands out.

This has an interesting anti-military, pro-looting message that you may not expect and some nice scenery. If you aren’t into movies where people wander aimlessly — I am kind of comforted by it — you will probably not enjoy yourself.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Time Tracers (1997)

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Rudd (James Michael Taylor) is a rich guy who wants to use his Kronos Project to explore time. He has an actual time machine designed by Dr. Carrington (Jeffrey Combs) and a team ready to go into the time stream and be part of the Civil War and battle dinosaurs and even a Dinoman.

The dinosaurs all come from Planet of Dinosaurs, the Dinoman seems to have the same head as Repligator, the story feels like the Bruce Jones and Richard Corben comic Rip in Time, a train crash that comes out of Horror Express and a feel that is very 70s live action Saturday morning but then there are very adult explorations of the impact of time travel.

Some people are going to see the quality of the acting and the budget and instantly start judging these movies. Maybe they should watch more of Bret McCormick’s movies. This feels like an entire bunch of movies all smashed together into one film and we’re all the better for it.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Aberrations (2012)

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Directed and written by Steve Sessions (Contagio), Aberrations was made for “the cost of an average funeral.” It’s all based around a connecting story where horror novelist Claire Huston (Dawn Duvurger) uses a Ouija board — adding this to my Letterboxd list — to steal ideas from beyond the veil of the choir invisible from a dead master of terror. That means we get four stories, like Alice (Mona Duvera) dealing with a ventriloquist doll, Bobby (Amber Peach) being watched, a killer (Eric Spudic) geocaching to kill someone (Krystal Stevenson Akin) and grave robbers (Denman Powers, Kirk Jordan) bringing a man (J.C. Pennylegion) his dead wife.

The one skeleton at the end of the trailer looks just like one from Creepshow and that seems intentional. I also like that when it says “four tales of the macabre,” it’s over one of the actresses’ rear ends in a shower and that proves that what sells a horror movie will never change.

This got released before the current run of films like this that are not really connected and are just shorts all thrown together, so at least there’s something making these stories work. This has been seen by hardly anyone on IMDB or Letterboxd, so maybe that will change.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Gangstaz (1996)

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Ace Cruz didn’t just direct and write this, he also stars in it as Billy, a drug dealer who worries about what he’s doing — even as kids are shot in drive-bys while he’s sitting on a park bench — and gets angry at his girl when she’s stripping. And oh yeah, he’s friends with Todd Bridges from Diff’rent Strokes who is using the drugs they should be selling. There are some martial arts scenes — very slow ones — and an ending that is totally Carlito’s Way except that it cost about the condiment budget of craft services for that movie.

Cruz has gone on to make PsychoticUrban Task ForceFateDesert of Death and Outrage: Born In Terror. But when else would he make a movie where Todd Bridges has a different woman in every single scene? That’s why I kept watching this, even when every single person sold out Billy.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Mad Dawg (2004)

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Greg Salman has only directed one other movie, Adventures In Pornoland, but after watching Mad Dawg, I’m going to check that out after this and not just because Veronica Hart is in it.

With the main character named Mac (Lamik Blake) and his wife called Lady Mac (Lunden De’Leon), it’s kind of obvious that this is blacksploitation take on Macbeth. Yet it works. There’s one really intense scene where Mac has finally risen up and started a series of bloody killings and his lover has to clean the blood from him in the bath as he just stares into nothingness, overwhelmed by what he’s done. Not what you expect for a low budget gangster movie.

This feels dark and bloody and rough in the best of ways. Lived in, if you will. It’s totally unexpected and I want to go back and live through it again.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Bio Tech Warrior (1996)

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Bret McCormick is someone whose movies must be allowed to wash over you. Like this one, which starts with an explanation of what a Bio Tech Warrior is, a “military product of the secret government is intended for use as a policeman, to prevent any insurrection among the citizens in the coming new regime” and something that has been created with pieces and parts of the grey ones.

Sure, it’s a home made costume that looks to combine pieces of BMX gear, a SCUBA suit and some paint, but who cares? When you start with an explanation like that and make a downbeat 90s cyberpunk movie that really wants to be a 60s science gone wrong warning movie, you cannot be wrong or bored.

You just know that if the government made a robot cop for its shadow killing, it would live on human blood.

There’s only one other review of this movie on IMDB and it makes me sad because of how it talks about this movie. They seem angry that they watched it instead of approaching this with the love and wonder that it deserves. Free your mind, my friend.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Holla If I Kill You (2003)

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John and Mark Polonia made a slasher with giallo POV moments in which Def Jam comedians are being killed and they’re all friends of Hollaback (Mike Troy Smith), whose career has been ruined by his act and now is getting threatening phone calls.

Just read that sentence again. That’s all you need to know. The idea that this even exists is why I have this website.

Comedians Brooklyn Mike, Kenny Williams, Rob Stapleton, F.O.B, Harris, Mike Yard, Wil Sylvince, Arnold Acevedo, Brad Lowery, Jay Phillips, Kareem,  Jerry Ford are all in this, as well as man on the street style interviews that set up the movie’s premise of dying on stage when you bomb and having to face off with the audience who is there to potentially ruin your act by booing you.

This has some solid gore despite how basement level the budget was but you know, I kind of love that someone decided to make a black comedy slasher. Who would have come up with that?

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: American Taboo (1983)

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This was directed by Steve Lustgarten, who won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Student Film. When you read the plot — “Unstable thirty-something introvert, who works as a photographer’s assistant, becomes obsessed with his underage female neighbor” — you might think that this is going to be exploitative. It’s not. Instead it comes across as completely real even if we’d never make the decisions that the characters live through.

Written by Lustgarten and his leads, Jay Horenstein (who plays Paul) and Nicole Harrison (who plays Lisa), this movie feels like we’re looking at actual lives. Sadly, American Taboo was the only movie Harrison made during a time that she said that she was “a poet from the Northwest who joyously misspent her youth in Hollywood.” Even more depressing is the fact that she died in 2011 from brain cancer. She feels like someone who could have broken through in some way to be a star.

You can see this as troublesome and wish fulfillment because the young girl is the aggressor in this movie, but it’s also so well made that I didn’t come away feeling strange or grossed out by it. Paul seems like someone who can’t connect with anyone and so when he does feel something with Lisa, it does seem like something that is only happening in his head even if it is the reality within the movie. He feels regret because he sees this as something that he could have kept from doing but Lisa is more of a realistic person, knowing that she wanted it and that it seemed like it was happening regardless of whatever front of morality Paul had erected.

What a strange film to be in the Visual Vengeance library of movies.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Gold Digger Killer (2006)

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Imani (Shatara Curry) has a boyfriend she’s putting through college while she works a job and is in school herself. After giving everything to her man, she feels like he doesn’t care, so after advice from her girlfriends — who are all getting abortions at the same time from the same doctor — she gets rid of him and goes to the club, where she meets Flip (Esteban Lastra) who takes her away for the weekend.

The problem is one of his friends watches her ex grab her behind and they assume she’s a gold digger. She’s drugged and assaulted several times, including after they leave by a hotel worker who she follows and murders. She finds herself hunting down all of the men who raped her before realizing that she may never run out of victims.

This is a movie that somehow combines live performances of spoken word with an abortion and a castration. It’s intense and at the same time quite cheap in the best possible sense of the word, feeling real and messy and I love that. Directed by Roderick Giles and written by Jeff Carroll (Holla If I Kill You), it’s in no way perfect but who needs that? It’s instead a film that looks at the war between the sexes and responds with bullets to the head and knives to dicks.