John “Bud” Cardos has been behind so many movies that others would spit upon, such as The Dark and Kingdom of the Spiders. Now, he’s back with a movie for the hip now generation. It’s time to talk about solar energy. It’s time to talk about the world after this one. It’s time to be bored senseless.

The Williams family has moved to the Sonoran Desert to get away from the dangers of urban life. There’s Grant (Jim Davis, who many would know from TV’s Dallas, but around these parts, we know him from being in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter), the grandfather. And then there’s his wife, Ana (Dorothy Malone, who won a Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind and had to suffer through this film), son Richard (Chris Mitchum, who we know from Bigfoot), his wife Beth and their kids, Steve and Jenny.

The mysteries of this film start small, like the news talking about a triple supernova and glowing things behind the barn. But soon, we learn that the supernova has torn a hole in the fabric of reality, unleashing UFOs and shutting down the electricity in the Williams home. And before you can say “stop motion,” there are miniature lizard creatures that look like they came straight out of Laserblast walking around.

All manner of creatures begin attacking the family, who take refuge in their barn. Then, they’re all beamed up in a UFO and taken thousands of years into the future. The film ends deus ex machina-style with the grandfather saying that the domed city in the distance is why they must have survived THE DAY TIME ENDED.

You know when you see Charles Band’s name on a movie that there are going to be all manner of stop-motion characters. This one delivers. And delivers. And…you get the picture.

William Girder died in a helicopter crash while scouting locations in 1978. If that hadn’t ended his life, who knows the heights of lunacy he would have achieved?

In just six years, he directed nine feature films — Asylum of Satan, The Get Man, Three on a Meathook, The Manitou, Sheba Baby, Project: Kill, the astonishing Abby, Grizzly and this movie.

This had to have been the first movie about the loss of Earth’s ozone layer. Who knew it would drive everyone, including animals, nuts? Certainly not the hikers in this tale who turn against one another and try to survive all of the animal assaults.

Steve Buckner (Christopher George, who is fighting with Michael Pataki and George Eastman for most appearances on this site) has a dozen or so hikers who are about to go to Sugar Meadow for a nature hike, even though Ranger Chico Tucker (former NFL player Walt Barnes) tells him that the animals have been acting strangely.

Along for this nature trail to hell are anthropologist Professor MacGregor (Richard Jaeckel, Grizzly), a married couple named Frank and Mandy Young (Jon Cedar, who in addition to being a recurring Nazi on Hogan’s Heroes was also the co-star, co-screenwriter and associate producer of The Manitou and Susan Backlinie, the first victim in Jaws), rich Shirley Goodwyn (Ruth Roman from The Baby!), her son Johnny, teenage lovers Bob Dennins (Andrew Stevens, who was in the Night Eyes films) and Beth Hughes, a former pro football player dealing with cancer named Roy Moore, a magical Native American guide named Daniel Santee (Michael Ansara, Killer Kane from the 1980’s Buck Rogers series as well as the voice of Mr. Freeze), a television reporter named Terry Marsh (Lynda Day George, always ready to scream “BASTARDS!”) and finally, a frenzied Leslie Neilsen in the role of his career as Paul Jenson, an ad executive who acts like every account guy I’ve ever had to deal with in my 24-year-long ad career.

Before you know it, wolves are attacking people in sleeping bags, vultures circle overhead, hawks knock women off cliffs, Leslie Nielsen goes beyond bonkers and kills a dude with a walking stick and threatens to assault women before wrestling a bear and getting his neck torn out, rats attack the sheriff who decides to eat before trying to figure out how to deal with this emergency, dogs turn on the people they loved, rattlesnakes bite people and the military dons hazmats suits to deal with all of it.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this movie is stupid. And awesome. It’s stupid awesome. And if you only know Nielsen from his later comedic roles, take a look at him in this movie. I love this movie. I don’t care what you think of me.

Here’s the drink to enjoy while you watch this movie.

Tentacle Painkiller

• 2 oz. Kraken spiced rum
• 4 oz. pineapple juice
• 1 oz. orange juice
• 1 oz. cream of coconut
• Dash of nutmeg
• Pinch of salt

1. Pour rum, pineapple juice, orange juice and cream of coconut into a cocktail shaker with ice. Mix it up.
2. Pour into a glass filled with ice. Drop in salt to give it the taste of the oceAdd a pinch ofthen top with nutmeg.

You can watch thi,s on Tubi or get the Blu-ray from Severin.

Hakujitsumu is based on a 1926 short story by Junichirō Tanizaki, which explores the nature of reality.

An artist and a young woman are in a dentist’s waiting room, and the man is too shy to even connect with her. In the same examining room, they’re both given an anesthetic as he imagines that she is being abused and tortured and even chased by a vampire. The uncut Dutch version even has a sexually explicit scene during which the woman is digitally attacked by the dentist.

A significant budget example of a pinky violence movie, this film even dared to show female pubic hair, a major cultural crime in Japan. Most instances — even in the most hardcore of films — are digitally fogged or have a mosaic over them.

Director and writer Tetsuji Takechi was nearly 70 when this was made. He’d already filmed Day Dream once before in 1964, after starting his career in kabuki theater and having his own TV show, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, during which he reinterpreted Japanese stage classics. His next film, 1965’s Black Snow, saw him arrested on indecency charges and embroiled in a public battle over censorship between Japan’s intellectuals and the country’s government. Takechi won the lawsuit, which paved the way for the pinky films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Black Snow may be more controversial for its themes than its sex: its protagonist is a young Japanese man whose mother serves the U.S. military at Yokota Air Base as a prostitute. He’s impotent unless making love with a loaded gun in his hand, and before long, he’s killed a black soldier before being cut down by several Americans. The film is also fiercely nationalist with Americans — most pointedly the black man who is killed — shown to be nothing but sex-wild animals.

In the journal Eiga Geinjutsu, Takechi said, “The censors are getting tough about Black Snow. I admit there are many nude scenes in the film, but they are psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defencelessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion. Prompted by the CIA and the U.S. Army, they say my film is immoral. This is, of course, an old story that has been going on for centuries. When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals. In fact, it was a matter of rank political suppression.”

The remake of Day Dream came a full decade after newspapers would not advertise his movies, and the director was only writing. That film is literally Japan’s first hardcore pornographic movie, and it was a big-budget movie played on big screens.

Yet while Westerners see his influence, in Japan, Takechi was an outsider in the mainstream and pinky world, so he’s forgotten. His right-wing politics clash with the protest ethos within other pinky films, so all in all, he’s lost in many ways.

Female star Kyoko Aizome, who plays Chieko, would gain notoriety from this film and become a star in the worlds of feature dancing (being arrested for indecency due to her on-stage behavior) and hard and soft AV (adult video) movies. According to an article on The Bloody Pit of Horror, she had her hymen surgically repaired so she could lose her virginity again on camera and also had her own King Kong vs. Godzilla moment when she starred in Traci Takes Tokyo opposite an underage Traci Lords.

As for the vampires, the dentist’s assistants (Saeda Kawaguchi and Yuri Yaio) have fangs, and the dentist himself is Kwaidan actor Kei Sato, a mainstream talent appearing in a movie that is anything but. Even after Chieko runs over the dentist and decapitates him, he comes back as a traditional film vampire.

After the original movie was made, South Korean director Yu Hyun-mok remade it as Chunmong (Empty Dream) and was arrested because there was a rumored nude scene. There were also rumors that actress Park Su-jeong had been humiliated by appearing naked on the set. The truth was that she wore a body stocking. Supposedly, the Korean film, which was kept off screens until 2004, is a superior piece of surrealist art.

I recall attending a convention and seeing my first Severin booth, and thinking, “If I start buying these movies, I’m never going to stop.”

I can’t always predict the future all that well, but after my first purchase — Dr. Butcher M.D., in case you wondered — I keep buying something from this label almost every single month.

The films of Frederick R. Friedel set, which also includes Axe and Blood Brothers, are just one of many examples of why I love Severin. Not only have they taken a Video Nasty and a drive-in obscurity and made them look better than they ever have before, they’ve also found almost everyone that worked on these films, gotten their side of the story and explained what actually happened before, during and after they were filmed.

Jack Canon, who the credits erroneously refer to as the kidnapped co-ed, plays Eddie Matlock, who is really the kidnapper. He was also in Axe, Maximum Overdrive and Trucker’s Woman. As the film begins, he’s already taking Sandra Morely (Leslie Rivers) captive. Her father puts an enormous ransom out for her return, so other criminals are now after them both to try and get paid.

Also known as Date With a Kidnapper, this is 75 minutes of a movie where things just happen for no reason, with no set-up or explanation. Axe is a movie where nothing happens for long stretches of time, whereas this is the opposite: a movie where all kinds of things happen, and the Stockholm syndrome is in full effect — although the kidnapper isn’t truly the villain he seems to be at the beginning.

This film looks gorgeous, getting every cent of its budget on the screen, and was shot by Austin McKinney, who worked on all sorts of genre films, from shooting Boris Karloff’s four Mexican films (The Snake People, House of Evil, Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror), Hot Summer in Barefoot County, Getting It On and Jaws 3-D to being part of the sound crew on Hellraiser III and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child to working on the special effects team on movies like Beastmaster 2, Escape from New York, Battle Beyond the Stars, Sorceress and The Terminator. He was even the uncredited editor for The Beast of Yucca Flats and the production manager for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

You can get this from Severin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Uninvited was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find a date when it aired. Do you know?

I love George Kennedy and want to state for the record that he deserved way better than this film, which is a total piece of shit. That said, I’ve proved time and again that my favorite movies to watch are mostly made out of fecal matter, so let’s dish.

Genetic Laboratories has decided to create a poisonous mutant cat that lives inside the body of a cute house cat. Why would they do this? Who knows, but it’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t have a movie.

The cat ends up on the yacht of “Wall Street” Walter Graham (Alex Cord, Michael Coldsmith Briggs III of TV’s Airwolf), who is running away to the Cayman Islands to escape the SEC. Along the way, he’s brought his bodyguard (Kennedy) and a bunch of hot girls and their boyfriends. Holy shit, there’s Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead! There’s Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Horror High, Battle for the Planet of the Apes)! And Rob Estes from USA’s Silk Stalkings!

This Japanese box art should tell you all that you need to know:

Or perhaps you’d like to see the German artwork:

The Uninvited was written and directed by Greydon Clark, who also directed Joysticks, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders. I would hope that any of those films is better than this. Becca looked at a photo from this movie and said, “Is that a stuffed animal?” Yes, it is. That’s the level of special effects you’ll see here.

There’s also George Kennedy getting bitten by a demonic cat. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, I don’t know what will.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes II was on USA Up All Night on July 5, 1996.

Don’t worry if you never saw Bedroom Eyes. This Chuck Vincent-directed film has nothing to do with it. Yes, the characters have the same names, but it’s all different actors. This insane film can really stand on its own, as it combines a Cinemax After Dark film with a giallo. If I’ve learned anything from the movies of Mr. Vincent, it’s that you have no idea where they’re going.

Harry Ross (Wings Hauser) lives in a world of little to no morals. His business partner gets an inside trading tip that could make them rich from one of his friends with benefits. But when it comes to love, his life is an even bigger mess.

Let me see if I can summarize it for you: His ex-wife JoBeth (adult film star and Vincent’s favorite actress Veronica Hart) tried to kill Harry five years ago and went to prison. Meanwhile, his wife Carolyn (Kathy Shower, Playboy Playmate of the Year 1986) has been all messed up since Harry broke up with one of his girlfriends, Alexandria, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident the very same night that Harry broke up with her.

Things get worse when Harry catches his wife aardvarking with Matthew, a hip young artist. To fix things, our hero, such as it is, decides to get horizontal with Sophie (B,r), an artist. He promises her that his wife can make her famous, but he soon falls for her.

Somehow, Sophie is Alexandria’s sister, there’s some murder, and there’s plenty of fishing for kippers. Moistening the Pope. Punching the cow. You know what I mean — sweet, sweet lovemaking. Even after Harry gets stabbed multiple times, he is still able to play some slophockey.

Linda Blair has brought me down many dark corridors. This is one of them, a movie that takes Wings Hauser through hell and finally jumping across rooftops and beating up cops. That’s what happens when you go in too deep.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes was on USA Up All Night on January 6, 1996 and February 1 and September 27, 1997.

If you enjoy Canadian horror, then you know who William Fruet is, the maker of Death Weekend (released here as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (better known as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped (AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasms and the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey.

This time, he’s taking on the genre of adult thriller, which by 1984 is kind of what giallo was leaning toward and then would completely become in the wake of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The ideas are the same — identity, secrets, sex, shame, violence — but it’s missing the great music and the fashion for the most part.

If you’re nostalgic for a film that aired on USA Up All Night, this movie is for you. This is the type of universe where a peeping tom is the hero, where a psychologist can see past his perversion — or encourage it — to see the man he is inside and where every other woman is evil.

This was, of course, followed by Bedroom Eyes II, which is way better because it has Wings Hauser, Veronica Hart and Linda Blair in the cast, as well as Chuck Vincent directing, and that movie also has no compunctions about feeling sweaty and filthy, while this one seems clean and wrapped up, like some of the 80s felt.

This one does get points for having its female antagonist repeatedly beat the protagonist up, including a slapstick bonk at the end as the police take her away.