Anak ng dilim (Child of Darkness) proves that director Nick Lizaso and writer Bong Ramos know that if you’re going to copy, copy from the best. Based on Carrie, this Philippines-shot horror movie is pretty much the same story. A young girl named Adela (Gladys Reyes) tries to go to public school and all the cool kids pick on her, yet she gets no love at home from her aunt Magda (Amy Austria).

“Pagtatawanan ka nilang lahat,” you know?

Where this differs from the Carrie we know and love is that there’s also a grandmother named Lola Pura (Gina Pareno) who is locked in the attic by the evil aunt and at the end, as Magda tries to strangle Adela with a chain, the old woman drags her evil daughter into hell and we get a happy ending.

Yes, Adela just got pig’s blood all over her and destroyed the school.

We still get a happy ending. Not as many split screens, though.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Vahset Kasirgasi (Brutal Storm) was directed and written by Kadir Akgün and is the story of Naide (Nur Incegül) and Cahide (Leyla Akin), two sisters who own the Gul Hotel in a beautiful tourist town in the South of Turkey. I don’t know what type of guests the sisters were expecting, but the loose moral fiber of their lodgers really starts to get to Naide and Cahide (more Naide, to be honest) and Hale, a nude sunbather, is shoved down the steps and impaled on a statue. To dispose of the body, the girls slice it up, cook it and serve it to the rest of the vacationers.

Soon enough, Nalan shows up looking for her dead friend and won’t give up. She gets a room just as more murders happen, like the always drunk and frequently loud Dilek, who make as lesbian pass at Naide who responds by stabbing her and Songül, who dares to be a single mother. Nalan gets kicked out for asking too many questions, but soon brings her friend Kaya as her fiancee and moves back in.

In case you didn’t guess, this movie is at times a shot for shot remake of It Happened at Nightmare Inn AKA A Candle For The Devil and I’m surprised as you that a 1970s Spanish horror movie by Eugenio Martin was remade in the 1980s in Turkey.

The other big star of this movie is the soundtrack which is literally a K-Tel Records best of your favorite horror soundtracks, lifting the disco theme from Friday the 13th Part 3, the drums from Cannibal Holocaust and pieces of Rambo: First Blood Part II, Suspiria, Deep Red and a dance party set to the theme from Ghostbusters.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Zapatlela is not the only movie from India that was inspired by Child’s Play.

Directed by Lawrence D’Souza and written by Talat Rekhi, Papi Gudia starts when a criminal named Charandas (Shakti Kapoor) escapes the police and runs into a toy store. Before he dies, he transfers his soul into a doll named Channi which is sold on the street to a young boy who needs a friend and gets a killing machine that throws his babysitter out the window.

You know, Child’s Play.

Yet it also has some of the weirdest song and dance moments I’ve seen in some time, as Alka Yagnik sings “Music I Love The Beat” at a talent show and it breaks whatever reality — yes, I realize this is a movie where a girl’s doll with a jaunty cap becomes a walking and talking murder puppet — exists and takes over the movie for nearly ten minutes of happy pop bliss. If you have issues with the zooms of Italian cinema, get ready to lose whatever is left of your mind or lunch.

Also, it has the following mission statement, in English no less (thanks to Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!):

“The story idea of the film is to create positive feelings in children which will make them careful against similar situations in the future and also to warn them against blind faith or surrender to alien things be it a doll or computer toys, robots, etc.”

I mean, just look at this doll.

Bring on all the remix remake rip-off Chucky clones and allow me to hold them.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Kuo-Chu Huang and written by Chi-Hua Liu, this stars Michiko Nishiwaki (In the Line of Duty 3) as Sha Sha Lee, a fashion photographer who keeps having visions of Chit Chit (Gordon Liu), a former kickboxer with brain damage who now stalks the streets of Thailand taking photos of women before he kills them.

Yet Sha Sha isn’t some frightening girl who needs saved. In one scene, she and her boss Queen (Cynthia Lam) fight a gang at a food stall while continuing their conversation. The problem is that Chit Chit soon figures out that she’s inside his mind and decides to kill her before she can figure out who he is and tell the police.

I’m used to see Nishiwaki as a villain and Liu as a monk hero, so this is definitely a big change. I also find it amusing that so many reviews call this a giallo — which it totally is! — but don’t remark how much it takes from The Eyes of Laura Mars. Instead of fashion and eroticism, you get fight scenes. And Queen being in love with Sha Sha, but can you blame her?

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Naki Yurter and written by Recep Filiz, Intikam Kadini (Revenge Woman) is the story of Aysel (Zerrin Dogan), One evening, four men had their car break down and her father generously allowed them to stay at their home. Later that evening, their assaulted her and killed him.

By the end of this movie, Aysel will have cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition… but no jury in Turkey would ever convict her! That’s because Intikam Kadini is inspired by the film whose tagline I just quoted: I Spit On Your Grave. Well, by inspired, I mean that Aysel goes to the city and seduces and kills each of the men one at a time. She doesn’t race a boat or castrate a man on camera like Camille Keaton did before her.

This film barely survived the purge of Turkey’s seventies sexploitation films and all that survives is a multiple generations removed videotape that has been uploaded to the web again and again.

Between the Muzak-sounding “Penny Lane” and Vangelis’ “Pulstar,” this has the music thievery that I demand in my movie watching. It’s just that I’ve never really gotten into rape revenge movies. The act itself is a real-life horror and so often, it seems like the movies wallow in the crime more than than they show the retribution. They should be empowering but they come off as shallow; I get that this is all exploitation but I have no interest in seeing women get treated this way unless they’re going to set people ablaze and go even further.

Normally, I would skip right past a movie with the poster and description — “A group of college friends receives the surprise of their lives when they discover there is an actual killer on the scene of a local haunted trail.” — but then I noticed that Haunted Trail was directed by Robin Givens.

Yes, the Robin Givens who pretty much knocked out Mike Tyson.

The first thing you may notice is that the killer looks like the black version of Michael Myers, which is another reason that I watched this. And the direction by Givens is actually fine. But the script by Raven Magwood — who is in the film as Portia — and Paul Lindsay doesn’t give her much to work with. It’s the much-told story of a haunted house — it was filmed at Madworld Haunted Attractions in Piedmont, South Carolina — having a real killer inside it and there aren’t many twists or turns, other than the cast being almost all black and having one token white friend, which is a nice inversion from the traditional slasher.

There was one part that made me laugh and that’s when one character went back for her earring. I’ve seen dumber things in slashers but I don’t know when. Desi Banks and Marquise C. Brown seem to be the biggest names in the cast but were new to me; they’re fine in their roles. The most entertaining thing about this movie? The IMDB reviews that are either 10 out of 10, proclaiming that this is a classic, or 1 out of 10 and taking incredible shots at this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The rich and famous are weird. They’re the kind of people who tip you a few thousand dollars all in $2 bills. But when you’re serving them, like the crew of this movie, you do it with a smile and worry about how it all makes you feel after.

Sadie (Mae Wilkerson) is the biggest thing to happen to music since probably Britney. On the day her father died, she strummed a guitar, sang a song and uploaded it to the internet. Ever since, she’s been famous. So famous that she can date two men — Robbie (Paul Toweh) and Christopher (Troy Osterberg) — and go from TV to tour with no time for her to recover. She’s on the verge of burning out, a fact that her bodyguard Bill (Charles Mesure) worries about and her agent Kara (Sarah Jane Morris) is pushing her through.

Maybe a boat vacation will help?

The crew of the luxury yacht — Reaghan (Shellie Sterling), Kyle (Freddie L. Fleming), Dylan (Anthony Starzynski) and Captain Jimmy (Jason Faunt) are here for their every need. Yet the slightest hint of drama or paparazzi sends Sadie off the deep end. And perhaps her team don’t all have her best interests in mind.

After all, the night before the cruise, she was so upset that she handed Sadie her bracelet over a stall in the women’s room, telling her that she no longer wanted it. That’ll be important later, you know. So will all the little innuendo and glares, as well as the fact that Captain Jimmy was once Kara’s first client. And that Sadie’s lawyer Camille (Sara Coates) was beaten into a coma that same night at the club.

Sadie is destined to drown after being tossed overboard. And you’ll probably put it all together long before Reaghan does. But it’s a well-shot and quick enough affair, directed well by Jodi Binstock, who made another decent Tubi original, Prisoner of Love.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After The Blue Lagoon came out in 1980, the idea of cashing in had to appeal to exploitation filmmakers all over the world. After all, all you needed was a young guy and girl willing to get naked and do some love scenes on an island paradise. In Canada, Stuart Gillard — the man who would one day direct Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III — made Paradise with Phoebe Cates and Willie Aames. In Italy, directors Enzo Doria and Luigi Russo — who would go on to produce the similar yet Biblical Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals a year later with Mark Gregory and Andrea Goldman — worked with writer Dardano Sacchetti (what movies didn’t he write in the 80s in Italy?) to bring their own version of La Laguna Blu to Italian screens with Fabio Meyer as Billy and Sabrina Siani as Bonnie.

As always, Siani is probably the best reason to watch this. She seems supernatural, like some kind of goddess carved from clay on Themyscira. She does the same in so many of the movies that she appears in, like Conquest, The Throne of Fire, 2020 Texas Gladiators and Ator the Fighting Eagle.

They land on a deserted island after a plane crash and think they’re all alone, but nope. There’s someone else on the island — Shanghai (Mario Pedone) — who at times seems like an enemy and other times a friend but then becomes an enemy again and then he saves them from a poisonous mollusk. Ah, confusion in an Italian movie, I love it so very much.

This was called Due gocce d’acqua salata in Italy, which means Two Drops of Salt Water. Blue Island is a much better name for this movie.

That said, for all the attention that Brooke Shields got for her beauty, I’d definitely say that she’s in Siani’s shadow.

In most of the world — other than Turkey, as witnessed by 3 Giant Men and Japanese video games, as Spidey fought Joe Musashi in  The Revenge of Shinobi — your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is, by definition of his heroics and nickname a hero. Not so in the world of Ghana bootleg cinema, as Rockson Film and Music Production created a movie that combined Peter Parker with the African myth of Ananse.

“In the olden days, Ananase the Spider was the wisest among all the beasts. Ananse’s wife was called Akonori Yaa, his four children were called Ntekuma, Afodotwdotwe, Etekelekelen and Naakorohwea. And it came to pass that Anase dies and when he died, his family member buried him in this bowl. Lady Spider and Oracle are currently the caretakers of this bowl,and they have formed a guild called the Anase Guild. They are mischievous and steal from people to fund the Guild. The money is kept by them and their power source is the bowl. Beware! Don’t open this bowl or Ananse’s spirit will escape. When he escapes, he will enter into a human body and transform into Spider-Man. With this power, he will be able to climb walls and jump like the spider.”

With those words, we begin.

Lady Spider and Oracle have been alive for centuries and they like nothing better than stealing money and beating children. After all, they have the power of the bowl to protect them. But what if that bowl ends up in human hands and everyone is confronted by a red and blue superhero who gets some revenge while throwing fireballs?

There’s also a demon and a gang that uses axes to slice open children to harvest their organs, so trust me, you probably won’t be bored. And if you are, just know that a really shiny PS1 Spider-Man will show up to fight people every few minutes.  I mean, the effects are close to Marvel level — they were fixed up in 2020 — at least proportionally when you consider that this was made for the cost of a new issue of Spider-Man (as of August 2023, $4.99).

You can watch both parts on YouTube.

The circus that Kapoor (Bir Sakhuja) and Jagdish (Madan Puri) own is a money-losing proposition but if they can just capture the giant ape Otango from the jungles of Malay, all their problems will be solved. Along with Professor Sharma, Rita (Ragini), a hunter named Ajit (Ajit) and Chandu the circus clown (Randhir), they go in search of the beast but find only destruction and the laboratory of Dr. Cyclops (K. N. Singh), a maniac who has started transforming humans into gorillas.

Dr. Cyclops has a daughter, Shobha (Helen), who wants to help the outsiders survive while all the mad scientist wants to do is marry Rita, even bringing Jagdish over to his side. It seems like nearly everyone is going to have to die and most of the jungle is going to have to burn before this is all over.

Amazingly, India has more than one kaiju movie, as this was followed by Balwant B. Dave’s Gogola, which is Godzilla. As for Shikari, it somehow combines Mighty Joe Young, King Kong and Dr. Cyclops — which was produced by Kong‘s Merian C. Cooper and, like all three movies, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack– into one movie.

Dr. Cyclops is pretty awesome. He can shrink people, create a giant gorilla and has a snake pit that he loves throwing people into. He also has a mutant chained to a wall that never really gets referred to. If I had a captive mutant, you best believe I’d be bragging about it.

Amazingly, this Kong also has songs. Five of them!

You can download this from the Internet Archive.