With “Kids In America” playing on the soundtrack over the sunshiny last day of Camp Briarbrook at the start of this movie, She Came from the Woods seems like the kind of movie that would be opening in theaters and drive-ins forty years ago. Instead, it’s on Tubi.

After the campers all leave for home. Peter (Spencer List), the bad boy grandson of the camp’s owner Gilbert McAlister (William Sadler) talks all of the camp counselors into conducting a ritual that brings back Agatha (Madeleine Dauer), the nurse who once terrorized the grounds with occult experiments four decades before.

Gilbert is planning to retire, leaving the camp in the hands of the rest of his family, which include good grandson Shawn (Tyler Elliot Burke) and their mother Heather (Cara Buono). But man, who can say what happens after this night, which starts with counselor Danny (director and co-writer Erik Bloomquist) losing his mind and attacking his crush Kellie (Emily Keefe) after she turns him down. This moment is completely shocking and out of nowhere, as is the further violence that follows.

Written along with his brother Carson, Erik Bloomquist has made a movie that doesn’t just harken back to the slashers of the 80s, but infuses the proceedings with tons of style, wit and no small amount of gore. And beyond the big stars like Sadler and Buono, there are good turns by Peter’s girlfriend Lauren (Clare Foley, Sinister) and Dylan (Adam Weppler).

Best of all, the movie also takes on more than just the slasher and supernatural, as an entire busload of kids goes missing in the woods and all suddenly become killers. You know how much a killer kid movie is appreciated around here.

The characters also make a point of not making the same mistakes as every other camp counselor. They don’t go off and make out in the middle of the murders (Veronica even screams at Dylan, “You want to f*** me to get my mind off my best friend being dead?” before punching him in the face), they call the police immediately and they work hard to not be separated. Not that it matters — whatever is out here in the woods is turning everyone insane.

Originally made as a short film made by Bloomquist brothers in 2017, I had a lot of fun with this movie. A lot of the reviews of it seem to take a holier than thou “how dare someone make another summer camp movie” spin and it kind of took me by surprise, as I really enjoyed what I watched. And you know, that’s the joy of watching movies for yourself and not depending on others to tell you if you should watch something or not. I mean, please keep coming back to this site and reading me discuss movies, but I want you, dear reader, to determine if a movie is something you like not because a group of hivemind sycophants thinks it’s good or not. Create your own sense of what you like and what you don’t. I don’t expect anyone to start liking late 80s Italian ripoffs of American movies, Turkish remakes or Philippines-shot war movies as much as me. I just got the whiff of “I have to show off my Film Twitter” cred in these reviews and you should remember: you are never as cool as the movies that you cover.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If you’re planning a sleazy triple feature of giallo yacht-based films, go with Interrabang, Top Sensation and this movie. Take liberal showers before, during and after all three movies and when your significant other walks in on these, you can blame me.

Waves of Lust has Ruggero Deodato at the wheel and he’s working from a script by Franco Bottari (Colt 38 Special Squad) and Fabio Pittorru (The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave) from a story by Gianlorenzo Battaglia and Lamberto Bava.

We meet young and in love couple Irem (Al Cliver, Endgame) and Barbara (Silvia Dionisio, Murder Obsession) in the middle of their vacation in Sicily. An older and not-so-in-love couple named Giorgio (John Steiner, Shock) and Silvia (Elizabeth Turner, Beyond the Door) beckons them to join them on their yacht and that’s when things get cooking.

Somehow, this movie becomes an anti-capitalist one, as Giorgio is an industrialist who owns nearly everything, including his wife, and lords it over anyone he can. That said, in no way will the message get in the way of what this movie is really about, and that’s making a giallo that’s more on the erotic side than the thriller part of the erotic thriller. Both Irem and Barbara end up with Silvia and hardly anyone stays clothed for this movie’s running time.

John Steiner, who usually overacts in nearly everything, has found a role in this that’s perfect for him. He’s out of control and a lunatic and given to pouring J&B in women’s belly buttons instead of shot glasses. One night it all goes too far and he repeatedly stabs his wife with a trident — yes, really — and throws her overboard. Our young and free working class kids respond to this by getting him drunk and convincing him that Silvia in a wig is his dead wife back from her watery grave. They dress him up in a SCUBA suit and toss his ass overboard and finally enjoy the fruits of labor. This would only be a bigger proletariat victory if they burned the yacht down and walked away from the harbor in slow motion smoking cigarettes.

There’s also a strange skeletal drawing above Giorgio and Silvia’s bed that keeps changing as the movie twists and turns. It’s not so much giallo as, well, what else would you call it? Sex and murder on a boat? Let’s just be find with the giallo title and enjoy this movie for what it is. Deodato has some nice diving footage and shows he’s as adept at filming gorgeous women as he is people being eaten and turtles being killed (yes, this is a Deodato movie, so an eel is violently killed for real, fair warning).

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on April 20, 2023 but it’s back thanks to Kino Lorber releasing it on blu ray. It comes with some great extras, including a brand new 2K scan from the 35mm Interpositive, new commentary by the absolute master of all things Bronson Paul Talbot, 4 TV spots that are remastered in 2K and a trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Wild Bill Hickok (Charles Bronson) is so haunted by dreams of a giant white buffalo that he hunts the monster like he’s the Ahab to its Moby Dick, soon to be joined by Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), who also hunts the beast as it killed his daughter.

Director J. Lee Thompson and Bronson worked together quite a bit. This was written by Richard Sale, who would also write Assassination for Bronson. This would be Bronson’s last Western after doing so many in his career.

For some reason, Wild Bill has a steampunk look to him*, but man, that opening gunfight is great. A lot of the crew came from King Kong, which was also produced by Dino De Laurentiis, including actors Ed Lauter and David Roya, composer John Barry and special effects magician Carlo Rambaldi, who created the animatronic life-sized bison for this movie.

Seriously, when that buffalo comes attacking them at the end, I lost my mind. It’s a full-size bison that would slide around on tracks and it’s seriously so eerie looking.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds said, “Another De Laurentiis epic about a giant buffalo that chews on Indians for bite-sized snacks. Charles Bronson manfully does his bit to sink this infamous White Elephant.”

With roles for Jack Warden, Kim Novak, Stuart Whitman, Clint Walker, John Carradine, Slim Pickens and Maryin Kove — did I cast this film? — I was always led to believe by this being in the Medveds’ book that it was horrible. Nope.

*Quentin Tarantino is also a fan of this movie, which explains the similar glasses that Django wears in Django Unchained.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Consider Light Blast (Colpi di Luce in Italy, which means Strokes of Light) Erik Estrada’s Rick Dalton moment. Made two years after the show that made him famous — CHiPs — was canceled and six years after People named him one of The 10 Sexiest Bachelors in the World, this finds Estrada in Italy working for Enzo G. Castellari, the same man who directed The Inglorious Bastards, 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Sinbad of the Seven Seas. Estrada even married his leading lady, Peggy Lynn Rowe, while in Rome making this movie.

He plays San Francisco cop Ronn Warren who must stop Dr. Yuri Svoboda (Ennio Girolami, who is in many a Castellari movie; he was the President in Escape from the Bronx and Viking in Sinbad), who has a laser ray that can melt human flesh — this being an Italian movie, we get to watch a young couple make love and then get burned down into goo and skeletons — unless he’s paid $10 million dollars.

How much of a tough guy is Warren? We meet him when he defuses a hostage situation by walking in just in the tiniest of a banana hammock carrying a turkey that has a pistol inside it. He shoots a criminal right in the face and then takes everyone else out while pretty much naked. Why? Who cares. It’s San Francisco, which has a Chinatown, baby!

This being an 80s movie, the final boss has decided to menace the Oakland Stunt Show, which means we get to see people race dune buggies. In fact, if you love car chases, I would dare say that this is the movie for you. And face melting. Seriously, Castellari and co-writer Tito Carpi (Tentacles, Alien from the Deep, Atlantis Interceptors) must have watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and decided to go all in on human features being turned into wet hot bloody goo.

Speaking of Atlantis Interceptors, if you liked the Maurizio and Guido De Angelis music from that movie, you’re in luck. It’s in this movie too. So is some of the Oliver Onions score from Yor, Hunter from the Future.

Also: This also uses footage from Fireball 500 for that stunt show. I am proud of my Italian people for believing in recycling before anyone else.

If you rented movies with me in the 80s and 90s, I would have totally picked this. And you might have wondered why and then when it started with gratuitous nudity and body melt, you’d look over and see me laughing and say, “Well, yeah. That’s why it picked this.”

FP 4EVZ tells the story of JTRO (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his legendary family of rhythm game warriors, which includes Chia-T (Tally Wickham) and their daughter Chia-TRO (Lib Campbell). To save humanity from a sober future, they must use the time travel device known as the Remix Machine.

Also, if you’ve never watched one of these movies, they demand that you believe that Dance Dance Revolution is how people battle in the world after the end. In this world, it’s called BEAT, which means Balance/Expeditiousness/Aggression/Tempo.

Crowd funded at the same time as the third FP movie, this has Space Ducks coming back to our Earth to rule it once again and only Chia-TRO can be the chosen one who can dance against them.

If you can wrap your head around that sentence, this movie is for you. I asked Jason Trost about this series and how it’s grown and he said, “I’m making a movie that me and the close people around me want to make. A lot of people aren’t going to like them, but I don’t really care. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, we’re appealing to the people who like FP movies. They’re going to love these and I’m making these movies for them.

I’m not trying to make FP for everyone. I feel like there are so many movies now where they try to expand their audience and they lose the magic of what they were when they start targeting everyone. Is everyone going to like RoboCop? Probably not. But do some people love it?”

Trost also discussed how each film in the series has become a different style of film: “I feel like with each movie, well, they’re all parodies, so to speak. They’re all satirical, parodying new genres and new movies every single time. So the joke just continues to evolve. At this point, the same characters are almost in completely different worlds every time.”

So what movie is FP 4EVZ? “Obviously, a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Then there was definitely the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, Romancing the Stone, things like that. I definitely want this to be a high adventure, going after an artifact movie. I mean, the two main characters are a man and a woman who bicker with each other about their relationship.”

I loved every minute, but I’ve been into these films since day one. I live by the motto “Dance with your mind, not with your feet.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Carrie Gemmell — who also appeared in director and writer Chris Alexander’s Queen of Blood and Blood for Irina — is She. During the day, she’s merely an office drone. Yet at night, She dreams of another woman (Cheryl Singleton) that she works with, as well as blood, sex and death. And when she wakes up, it isn’t where she went to sleep. And her fangs are growing.

I thought maybe it was all in her head, but then after luring the woman back home, She opens her mouth and reenacts The Company of Wolves with a head emerging from her lips. Or is this her finally coming out? Ah, maybe I just need to remember the words of Georges Bataille. “Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.”

If you haven’t seen one of Alexander’s films, they remain deceptively simple. There’s a moment here where She is looking in the mirror when she wakes up and the white wall creates an effective split screen, juxtaposing her inspecting herself with absolute nothingness. It’s all in camera, not something created in the edit, and so much of this is just art emerging for long takes or color taking control of the screen.

There’s also another woman — Shauna Henry — who was Irina in Blood for Irina, Blood Dynasty and Queen of Blood. Is she playing the same role, lending her vampiric power to this tale of another creature that walks the night — “To walk the night / To feel no love / To know the touch of another kiss / Never more.” — and wakes to wonder if these transformations and desires could be true?

Instead of Samhain, maybe I should have considered The Electric Prunes as a theme for this film. “Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room / I touched your golden hair and tasted your perfume / Your eyes were filled with love the way they used to be / Your gentle hand reached out to comfort me / Then came the dawn / And you were gone / You were gone, gone, gone.”

Made in 2014, How to Save Us prefigures the last few years of our reality by being about Brian Everett (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his younger brother Sam (Coy Jandreau) during the middle of a mysterious quarantine. When Sam goes missing in Tasmania, Brian has to travel there to save his brother.

In the world of this movie, Tasmania is filled with the spirits of its many dead souls, so Brian must cover himself in the ashes of the dead to move amongst them. After his sister Molly (Tallay Wickham) asks him to search for their missing sibling, she givcs him Sam’s notebook, which has the title of this movie scrawled on the cover.

There are some big ideas here, with the entities being heard on the radio, Brian dealing with the loss of both of his parents and the fact that electricity can stop the dead, which means that a Nintendo Power Glove can become a weapon. Despite the addition of that nostalgic game gear, this movie has a darker edge than Trost’s The FP series.

When I got the chance to speak with Jason Trost, we discussed the end of the world that we’ve been living through. When discussing the actual pandemic, he said “You sit there and watch it outside and it’s like the laziest zombie apocalypse ever. (laughs) None of these movies really prepare you for it, because it was very tame in comparison to what we’ve watched. I think we’ve all been built up towards something and what we got wasn’t Mad Max.”

I really enjoyed the dark world that this movie shares and how it’s characters only speak through voiceover. It’s a way different film for Jason Trost and I enjoyed its challenges to the viewer.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sobriety and time travel aspect threaten JTRO (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and the FP in the third installment of The FP. What can twenty grand and some green screen get you? A movie with a vision.

L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy) has returned, thanks to the aforementioned chronal messing about, as well as JTRO’s daughter with Chai-T, Chai-TRO (Lib Campbell). Where the first two movies are filled with tons of action — and this has some — this builds the universe and makes it dense, kind of like how by the late 90s you needed several guides and needed to know someone to be able to understand a single issue of X-Men. The mythology has gotten so rich that you need to wade into it slowly.

When I got the opportunity to interview Jason Trost, he said that “I feel like with each movie, well, they’re all parodies, so to speak. They’re all satirical, parodying new genres and new movies every single time. So the joke just continues to evolve. At this point, the same characters are almost in completely different worlds every time.”

Are the movies still exciting for him? It sure seems that way, as he added “…every time there’s no rules. I can really just kind of do what I want with it. The only rule per se of this franchise is that each one has to be more ridiculous and the stakes have to be higher every time. If I can do that I can pretty much do whatever I want. I think that’s kind of what I’ve built and set up with this franchise. If you’re still here at this point, you kind of know that’s the deal. Every time it gets to be fresh because they get to go on an entirely new adventure.”

You can watch this on Tubi.