From the very beginning of this movie, you know that you are in the world of Alvaro Passeri and it is a very strange place.

The camera pans down a long hallway inside a hospital and there we see labs, operating rooms and storage rooms, all rendering in extreme detail but also looking like paintings. In one room, however, there are creatures still alive inside restraints, dead things inside jars and a man named Michael Corday operating on a human head.

One would wonder why the film suddenly cuts to Gayle Mainwaring and her photo studio, but this is, again, not our world. And one not like any other movie. There’s a model named Lucy shows up and gets raped and killed in a scene that shocked me. No one knows what to do before Corday takes charge and shows everyone how to get rid of the evidence. He takes her body and removes her green eye in a surgery scene much like the opening of the film.

But then this goes from a mad scientist movie to a giallo, as everyone at the party gets murdered. Except no giallo would have the budget to be in the Arctic and the pyramids, as this movie takes us, but it’s through the low res CGI that Passeri is the master of. There’s also an incredible dive into molten steel.

Now, you may ask, why do a cave explorer, a construction worker, a foundry foreman, a mountaineer, a famous fashion photographer, an archaeologist and the world’s best eye surgeon all get together and randomly assault and murder young women?

This movie has BS science the likes of which Argento and Cozzi could never dream of, visuals that no one has ever seen before and absolute disregard for making a film that in any way fits into any definition of normal. You can’t look away from a single second of it but sometimes you have to, because this is the kind of film that overwhelms you with how dense it is.

The only bad thing about it is that its the fifth of Passeri’s films and the last he made. By reading his website, it seems like he’s concentrating on making automatons. If he ever wants to make another movie, I’m willing to kickstart as much cash as he needs.

You can also go back and watch the other movies that he worked on. He did scenic sculpture for Tentacles, Caligula, The Shark Hunter, Starcrash (that makes sense), Inferno, The Last Shark, Alien 2: On Earth, Piranha II, Hercules (again, makes sense) and 2019: After the Fall of New York. He also did effects for Warriors of the Year 2072, Atlantis Interceptors, Light Blast, The Wild Beasts, Sinbad, The Barbarians, Aenigma and Dolls.

I have so many questions about this movie. Someday, I hope to have answers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Roulette One is a flying luxury casino filled with millionaires and a casino manager who plans on robbing them thanks to his computer programmed to cheat. But then the plane flies through a cloud and everyone on board starts to either become a monster or become eaten by those monsters.

If anyone else made this movie, I’d be calling out how much of it rips off The Thing, Alien and maybe even The Langoliers. Instead, it’s an Alvaro Passeri movie and I’m celebrating it.

Soon, the crew of Carol (Sinne Mutsaers), Janet (Basia Wajs), Don (Eric Bassanesi) and Pat (Giulia Bernardini) are dealing with alien monsters that explode out of people and I’m loving every moment on this CGI-generated plane. And by CGI, I mean everything looks unreal beyond belief. And then Janet has an alien literally crawl between her legs and impregnate her.

I’ve never even considered a movie made with Amiga-level computer animation that has mini-golf on a luxury jet and chess that people bet on. Everything looks soft and brightly colored, like candy that I can’t wait to let my eyes devour. There are also so many lens flares.

Why do they have a flamethrower on this plane? Actually, of all the questions I have, that’s the simplest one. The big one is who are these movies for outside of Passeri? Every one of his films is so idiosyncratic and outright strange and not in the way that says, “Look how wacky I am!” They are absolutely earned strangeness, pure joy captured and ready to reach those ready for it.

Also: Every review that I read where people talk about how bad this movie is or how horrible the effects are, I don’t get mad. I feel bad for these people. I am saddened for them and their lack of imagination and aesthetics.

I also totally appreciate that of all the things that Passeri has ripped off for this movie, the ending of Nightmare City is one of them.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I used to worry that I would run out of berserk Italian movies, especially when the 1990s give way to the 2000s but that shows what I know, because The Mummy Theme Park is one of the most baffling, weird, wonderful and just plain strange movies that I’ve seen.

Alvaro Passeri has only directed five movies*, including Plankton, Flight to Hell, The Golden Grain and Psychovision. His animation skills — he worked on Cinema Paradiso, The Shark Hunter, The Wild Beasts, Atlantis Interceptors and more — really come in handy here because this is a movie that sees its low budget and says, “We can do more.”

An earthquake reveals the underground City of the Dead in Egypt and Sheik El Sahid get the somewhat bright and probably more deranged idea to take all of the mummies and fit them with animatronics and turn them into a Jurassic Park in the sands. He wants it to be a big deal, so he calls over photographer Daniel Flynn (Adam O’Neil) and his co-worker Julie (Holly Laningham) to take photos of the place, which as far as I can tell is one room with mirrors and miniatures and all manner of in-camera and in-post special effects working as hard as they can and then some to make this movie look bigger than it is while also looking cheap while also appearing to be one of the most charming movies I’ve ever seen. It’s neon, it’s glitter, it’s robot mummies, it’s insane.

And yet, this isn’t a movie made goofy on purpose. It’s deliriously sure of itself and yet unaware of what it is at the same time and that’s the combination that I love more than any other when it comes to weird movies.

Can the flash of a camera bring mummies back to life? Are women’s breasts the only thing that can stop them? Will heads get torn off? Will someone puke up everything inside them? Can a chase scene go on forever? Will there be long scenes of fashion that pad the running time? Will there be a model train that goes through a sphinx? Is there also an evil sorceress? Will the sheik’s harem fight against one another and will one of them also be a hologram? Will there be a souvenir shop that has pharaoh heads that spit out beer?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

I mean, this is the kind of movie where a dude gets his head sliced in half and the results look like those cutaway pages in encyclopedias we all used to obsess over. And for that reason and so many others, this is perfect. Man, I’m still processing this movie. I keep reading reviews laughing about how cheap this movie looks and we should be so lucky to have this in our lives.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Under that name, that is. There’s also the rumor that he’s Massimiliano Cerchi, the name under which he’s directed seventeen movies including The Penthouse that came out this year. Unless there are two directors and special effects guys who have the same name and I’ve been surprised before and if you do the math, Cerchi was making those movies when he was eight. IMDB used to have them as the same person and now they’re separated, so perhaps…who can say!?!

Let me just let Alvaro Passeri tell you what this movie is about.

“It’s Christmas Eve and the snow is falling gently all around a log cabin. This is the home of Mary. who lives here with her family. She has a serious case of flu and is lying in bed with a very high temperature. Gathered around her is Kevin her young brother. her mother Nancy and her grandfather. Kevin opens the Christmas gifts and finds a book called The Golden Grain He starts to read it. Out in distant space, the Little People’s Castle is threatened by the Black Fortress. ruled by Makeb. The king of the castle calls the Queen of Hope for help. Her name is Jade and when she reaches the Fortress she gets drawn into a dangerous computer game with Makeb. She is attacked on all sides by huge balls of fire. slashing swords. laser rags and a terrible monster. Back at Mary’s house. Jethro, a nasty neighbor, is trying to take the place of Nancy’s husband who is missing, presumed dead. When the game comes to an end Makeb plays the Joker and a flood sweeps Jade away. At the same time Mary’s heart stops beating! Then Jade reappears again alive and well. The death ray hits Makeb. whose mask falls off to reveal the face of Jethro. Jade triumphantly reaches the Castle of the Little People and is presented with a grain of corn as her reward. which begins to glow in the palm of her hand. She throws it and it lands by Mary’s cabin. Suddenly cured. she leaps out of bed. ripping off the scarf around her head, to reveal the face of Jade! At that moment the door opens and Mary’s father comes in. having escaped from a mine he had been trapped in for weeks. At midnight the family gathers around the fire. happy and united once again. It’s going to be a happy Christmas.”

This is literally the description of the movie and it gives most of the film away.

Let me tell you something.

You could be told word for word everything that happens in this movie and in no way will you be ready for it.

This is The NeverEnding Story that I had hoped that movie would be when I saw the trailer as a kid. Alvaro Passeri is the closest director that I’ve ever seen to Luigi Cozzi at his wildest. This is also very The Princess Bride if that movie also had a Satanic figure whose face looks like he came directly out of Ron Ormond’s The Burning Hell.

The first of Passeri’s films I saw was The Mummy Theme Park and this delivers the same delirious world of gigantic factories filled with tiny rooms of drones, all creating death machines, all preparing to fire mind cannons at the Queen of Hope. Yet these are all human beings inside those cubicles from Hell, all moving and living and breathing.

There are puppet people, there’s an entire bar filled with skeletons — and the dog hero also bites one of the leg bones and runs with it — and so much charm. This is a movie that I have run through my head again and again, way more often than movies with budgets thirty times more.

A video game puppet stop motion Christmas movie with an alternate reality inside a book that brings you back to a potential snowbound tragedy. All of Passeri’s movies have a sense of childlike wonder, but they often have eyeballs getting torn out and bodies being destroyed. This one is kid-friendly, even if it might be the oddest movie your children ever see.

You can watch this on YouTube.

It’s rare for Becca to get as upset about a movie as Plankton, but I’ve heard about this movie repeatedly since she watched it with me and with good reason. It’s the kind of movie so bad that it circles the sun like Christopher Reeve Superman and comes back twice as horrible as it was before.

In short, this is the kind of movie I get on here and write a thousand words about.

Alvaro Passeri made The Mummy Theme Park and for that he gets a lifetime pass to make movies this horrifically rough. The editing gets so frenetic at one point that I was waiting for Çetin İnanç to fly over from Turkey and tell him to settle down.

Also known as Creatures from the Abyss, this film has the absolute nadir of special effects within it, as radioactive fish mutate and then take over humans and you want everyone to die, particularly Bobby, who makes some of the worst jokes in the history of horrible jokes. In fact, this movie is pushing me to look up new synonyms for worst, awful, bad and poor.

And yet I love it.

But how can I hate a movie that has a cyclopean mermaid clock that talks to everyone and says cute things and comments on the film? Why is there an anthropomorphic clock in an aquatic slasher film? Why is there an endless vomit scene and an even more intense fish-stomping scene?

I nearly had a seizure several times in this movie from laughing and the strobing editing. And then some woman started growing crab claws out of her head that were basically crab claws tied to her head, perhaps via the magic of sweatband. And I nearly forgot that the shower has an artificial intelligence that just wants to see people have sex with each other or themselves while it watches.

I owe my wife an apology and you one as well, because as always, I’ve probably made this sound way better than it is. I’ll probably watch it at least ten more times and fall in love with it even more, because it is obviously made by someone who has no idea that it was approaching John Waters levels of upsetting moments when all he wanted to do was make a silly little horror movie.

That said, I’ve watched every movie that Passeri has made and he definitely has a style. It’s unlike any movies that I’ve seen anyone else make.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.