Category Archives: Movie reviews

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: The Reflecting Skin (1990)

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Aug 18-24 indie comix week: When I was a kid, I used to read Mad Magazine and Cracked, so when I got a little older, it didn’t take much convincing to pick up Eightball and Hate. I’m an OG in the “complaining about superheroes” game, and my scars were anointed on the Comics Journal message board!

The first of three horror movies by Phillip Ridley — followed by The Passion of Darkly Noon and Heartless — The Reflecting Skin starts with three friends — Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper), Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall) — doing what bored kids stuck in Idaho do. That would be inflating frogs and blowing them up all over a widow named Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan).

Seth lives in a gas station, where he works when cars pull up, as his parents, Ruth (Sheila Moore) and Lewis (Duncan Fraser), exist in a state of ennui toward one another. At one point, a car full of men in dark suits pulls up and one of them promises that they will see Seth soon. Seth has been talking to his dad about vampires, so when he is sent to apologize to Dolphin, she mentions that she feels 200 years old. He starts to think that she is one of the dead.

Eben soon goes missing, and Seth’s father is sure they will be arrested for it, as everyone in town knows that he is gay. Instead of facing the police, he sets himself on fire. Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) comes back from the Army to help raise Seth and soon falls in love with Dolphin. At the same time, Seth finds an ossified fetus and believes that it is Eben, whom he turns to, convinced that his brother’s radiation poisoning is being fed on by Dolphin.

Ridley said of this movie, “I created a fabulous child-eyed view of what I imagined America to be like – it’s a kind of mythical once upon a time never-world, where guys look like Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, and everything is set in a Wheatfield and it all looks very American gothic.”

Cinematographer Dick Pope captured the magic hour here, orange fields of grain set against the black car filled with evil. Everything heads to a dark end, as the actual monsters of the world aren’t the monsters in a child’s mind, but the very simple killers that roam the highways around the small town.

Coil, which had Stephen Thrower as a member, used samples from The Reflecting Skin on Stolen & Contaminated Songs.

“It’s all so horrible, you know, the nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse. One day, you’ll wake up, and you’ll be past it. Your beautiful skin will wrinkle and shrivel up, you’ll lose your hair, your sight, your memory. Your blood will thicken, and your teeth will turn yellow and loose. You will start to stink and fart, and all your friends will be dead. You’ll succumb to arthritis, angina, senile dementia, you’ll piss yourself, shit yourself, drool at the mouth. Just pray that when this happens you’ve got someone to love you, because if you’re loved you’ll still be young.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

CAULDRON FILMS BLU-RAY RELEASE: House of Witchcraft (1989)

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La casa del sortilegio (The House of the Spell) finds our old friend Umberto Lenzi making a TV movie that fits right into his Ghosthouse style, and I, for one, could not be happier.

This is one of four films in the Doomed Houses series, which also includes his The House of Lost Souls and Fulci’s The Sweet House of Horrors and The House of Clocks. And he decides that what this movie needs is lots of the hero having visions of losing his head and having it thrown into cauldrons and giant vats of soup. And you know what they say, there ain’t no fake severed head like an Italian fake severed head.

Also: our hero Luke has a tarot-obsessed wife named Martha, and if I know my Italian exploitation conventions — and you know I do — anyone named Martha is evil.

Also, Italian directors hate cats, and Lenzi says, “I guess I’ll continue that tradition,” and has a scene where someone throws a black cat at the TV, and it explodes on impact.

You better believe that the words La Casa were huge on the posters for this. I mean, by posters, it played on TV. Ah, you know what I mean.

Lenzi makes a film that may not be a narrative wonder, but if you made a supercut of all its weirdest scenes, you’d find a priest being beaten to death with a crowbar by a witch, a boyfriend chopped into pieces and dumped down a well and a basement where it snows and the daughter becomes a ghost. And maggots!

“You have to have maggots in this sauce,” screamed Lenzi, mad with cooking energy in the kitchen.

This movie is also called Ghosthouse 4, and for that, I love it sixteen times as much. Also: I went deep on the La Casa movies in this article.

This Cauldron Films release is for the non-box set retail edition of House of Witchcraft. It has a new 2K restoration and extras including commentary by Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth, and interviews with FX artist Elio Terribili and cinematographer Nino Celeste. You can order it from MVD.

Bonus: You can hear me discuss these movies on my podcast:

CAULDRON FILMS BLU-RAY RELEASE: The Sweet House of Horrors (1989)

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If you read the description for this movie — a young couple who are murdered by a burglar return as ghosts to watch over their two young orphaned children and save their home — you may think, “Ah, a nice movie for the whole family.”

You may also ask who directed this. Well, good news. It’s Lucio Fulci, which means that the murder of the parents is so gory that it even gave me pause, and then the rest of the film is very family friendly and has numerous scenes of kids laughing and having a good time at the ghost antics. The dad’s head gets crushed and the mom’s eyeball pops out and oh Lucio, I love you so much. You can’t help but be you. Only you would make a horror movie for kids and have a man get run over by a truck and his intestines show up on the outside of his body.

Somehow, Fulci did show some restraint by having Cinzia Monreale in his movie and not having a dog tear her throat out with its teeth.

Sarah (Ilary Blasi) and Marco (Giuliano Gensini) don’t want to leave their house. And why should they, as their parents can make toys float and throw rotund men down the stairs, which will never not be funny and I’m a rotund man and feel that I can say that.

After all manner of attempts to get them to leave, the parents decide to put their essences into two small stones so that they can be with their children forever, which is as sweet as Fulci gets.

He follows this by having a spiritualist try to take those stones, which quickly melts his hand into a bloody stump of goo. The kids find this uproarious fun and laugh as they freeze for the credits.

Fulci spoke very positively on the two made for TV films made for the La case maledette series — the other is House of Clocks — telling Roberto Curti in Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989 that they were “Fantastic! Excellent filmmaking!” and “two of his best films he made!”

I kind of am on his side on this one. I mean, what other Fulci movie has a ghost shove a large man down the steps and kids dance and sing “Sausage is dead!”?

This Cauldron Films release is for the non-box set retail edition of The Sweet House of Horrors. It has a new 2K restoration and extras including commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth, and interviews with Massimo Antonello Geleng, Cinzia Monreale, editor Alberto Moriani, Gigliola Battaglini, Jean-Christophe Brétigniere, Lino Salemme and Pascal Persiano. You can order it from MVD.

BONUS: You can hear me discuss these movies on my podcast:

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

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Aug 18-24 indie comix week: When I was a kid, I used to read Mad Magazine and Cracked, so when I got a little older, it didn’t take much convincing to pick up Eightball and Hate. I’m an OG in the “complaining about superheroes” game, and my scars were anointed on the Comics Journal message board!

Why did I wait so long to watch this? Why was I able to buy it at a dollar store? Why isn’t it on a major streaming service?

Directed by Jared Hess, who co-wrote it with his brother Jerusha, Gentlemen Broncos has some of Napoleon Dynamite in it. Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano) has a strange home life, one seemingly fixated on his dead father, living with his mother Judith (Jennifer Coolidge), who dreams of selling her nightgowns but is stuck working retail and making popcorn balls. Ben escapes his real life by writing science fiction. His latest book is Yeast Lords, which is all about Bronco (Sam Rockwell), a hero he has based on his father. As he writes, the audience sees the movie in his head.

Ben’s a nice guy. He’s unable to talk to most girls, but when introduced to fellow writer Tabatha (Halley Feiffer) at a science fiction writer camp, he allows her to read his story. She reacts strangely, running away, when in truth she’s stunned by how good it is. I get the feeling she wants to be with him but doesn’t have the language or ability to do that; instead she’s with Lonnie (Hector Jimenez), who makes cheap SOV-style films.

At the camp, Ben takes a lecture from one of his heroes, Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jermaine Clement). He quickly realizes that the person who was his idol is really a jerk; eventually, one realizes that he’s run out of ideas. He turns a contest at the camp — to publish one winner’s work — into a chance to steal an idea. Ben’s Yeast Lords becomes Brutus and Balzaak with minor changes.

Throughout, Ben’s mom wants more for him. She introduces him to a Guardian Angel from church, Dusty (Mike White), who is less a father figure and more someone who teaches him how to shoot blowdarts. When everything goes bad in a few days — the Yeast Lords movie that Lonnie made is horrible, a rich man tries to assault his mother under the pretenses that he wants to get her clothes into stores and Chevalier shows up at a local bookstore — Ben flips out and gets arrested.

This is where his mother’s love appears again. She has sent all of his books to be registered and officially bound by the Writers Guild of America. There’s proof that he’s the one who wrote Chevalier ‘s work. His books replace those ones and everyone lives happily forever after.

From the opening — “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans playing over book covers — to how fully formed its villain is (and how much he sounds like Michael York in Logan’s Run — thanks Gizmodo, I couldn’t figure out who he reminded me of) and the love that drives the end of the movie, I was totally won over by this movie. At one point, Tabatha tells Ben, “Well, you’ll never get anywhere by just letting your mom read your work.” I am so happy to know the truth.

 

CAULDRON FILMS BLU-RAY RELEASE: The House of Clocks (1989)

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Lucio Fulci made two movies in the Houses of Doom series of TV movies, this one and The Sweet House of Horrors, and both of them are totally his vision, and we’re all better for that.

House of Clocks brings several narratives together: Victor and Sarah are an elderly couple who live in the titular house and are very protective of what they own to the point that they’ve already murdered their money-hungry nephew and his wife, as well as the maid who grew suspicious. But hey, Al Cliver still loves them, even if he has one eye, and he protects the grounds.

Meanwhile, Diana, Tony, and Paul are shoplifting and killing cats — welcome to Italy — when they hear about the old couple and how rich they are. Diana talks her way into the house, but things unravel quickly, and before you know it, they’ve killed everyone in the house, and the clocks start moving backward, and the dogs that patrol the grounds have them trapped.

So they do what anyone else would: they get high and Diana and Tony make love, leaving Paul all sad and soon dead at the hands of the revived occupants of the house, with Sarah coming back to stab Diana’s hand directly to a . Tony Tony getting pulled into a grave before the nephew and his wife assert themselves.

The trio wakes up in their car and is sure that they must be really high and all of this was in their head, but then that cat comes back from the dead and kills them all. Well done, cat.

Everyone in this movie is horrible, and they all deserve to die, and they all do several times. The best part of all of it is that Fulci made this for TV, and it has multiple stabbings, geyser sprays of blood, old women being shot, murdered cats and someone stabbed so deeply through the stomach that you can see sunlight through their body. Suffice it to say that it never aired and eventually played Japanese theaters.

This Cauldron Films release is for the non-box set retail edition of The House of Clocks. It has a new 2K restoration and extras including commentary by Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth, and interviews with cinematographer Nino Celeste, composer Vince Tempera, 1st AD Michele De Angelis, FX artist Elio Terribili, and actors Paolo Paoloni, Carla Cassola and Al Cliver. You can order it from MVD.

Bonus: You can hear me discuss these movies on my podcast:

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Critters (1986)

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We start in an asteroid prison, where the Krites hijack a spaceship and escape to Earth. The warden hires Ug (Terrence Mann) and another shapeshifting bounty hunter to follow them.

As they study Earth transmissions, Ug takes the form of rock star Johnny Steele and the second remains blank. You will hear the song “Power of the Night” so many times in this movie that you’ll be able to sing it yourself.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, the Brown family is enjoying rural Earth life. There’s father Jay (Billy “Green” Bush, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday), mother Helen (Dee Wallace Stone, The Howling, Cujo, Popcon), and their kids April and Brad. As the kids go to school, Jay waits for mechanic Charlie (Don Keith Opper, who is in all four Critters films) to show up. Once a major league prospect, he started getting messages from radios and possibly even UFOs through his fillings and went insane.

That night, the Krites’ ship crashes. Thinking it’s a meteorite, Jay and Brad check it out only to catch one of the monsters eating its way through a cow. They cut all the power to the farm, take out a cop and shoot Jay with one of their tranquilizing quills.

While all this is going on, April is horizontally dancing with NYC transplant Steve (Billy Zane!) who gets eaten almost immediately. Her brother saves her with some firecrackers. Just then, the bounty hunters come to town, with one of them continually changing shape to become different townspeople.

Everything works out well, with the Krites being wiped out. The bounty hunters even leave behind a device to call them in case of a sequel as we see eggs that are about to hatch.

There’s a funny scene with a Critter playing with an E.T. doll, which Dee Wallace Stone also starred in. And I almost forgot — genre vet Lin Shaye (the Insidious films) shows up too!

The character design of the Critters is probably the best part of the film. The Chiodo Brothers also worked on Ernest Scared Stupid, Team America: World Police, Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the “mousterpieces” in Dinner for Schmucks and, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Depending on when you grew up, Critters is either silly fluff or a treasured part of your childhood. I tend to the former while Becca is definitely on the latter choice. Director Stephen Herek also directed plenty of her other favorites like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead and The Mighty Ducks.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Country Hooker (1974)

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Sue (Rene Bond) and Jan (Sandy Dempsey) look like they’re stranded and two musicians, Dave Anderson (Bond’s man Ric Lutze) and Billy B (John Paul Jones), pick them up. The truth is, they’re setting them up to get taken by their pimp Mike (Louis Ojena ) and forced to play as his band, but they both have hearts of gold and decide to save the men.

Director Lew Guinn was the DP for Deadwood ’76 and Terror In the Jungle, as well as the editor of Invasion of the Star Creatures. This is the only directing credit he had.

Executive produced by Harry Novak — who paid for Bond’s breasts, making her the first American adult actress to get implants, unless some pervert writes and proves me incorrect — this also has Marie Arnold (The Toy Box, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!, Meatcleaver Massacre, Fantasm) and Penny King (The Training of Bunny).

The sex scenes are boring, the movie is kind of gross looking, the country songs are horribly mimed and Rene Bond is an angel that lifts this all on her own and makes it watchable. I can’t tell yoy how many movies I’ve watched just for Rene Bond. Maybe I can. Maybe I shouldn’t have made fun of other perverts, because now I feel bad.

The ending kind of comes out of nowhere!

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Country Blue (1973)

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Also known as On the Run and One for the Money, Two for the Show, Country Blue has the balls to rip off a Janis Joplin song for its tagline, “For Bobby Lee and Ruthie, Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I like this one more: “Young and in love, she broke the law…the law broke her.”

Bobby Lee Dixon (Jack Conrad, who also directed, co-wrote, produced and edited this film; he’s not the only Hicksploitation director to make an auteur project as the entire genre is predicated on movies like Billy Jack) has just been released from jail and wants to make a better life for his lover Ruthie Chalmers (Rita George). But she can’t even afford to leave her husband, so her father, J.J. “Jumpy” Belk (Dub Taylor) and Arneda Johnson (Mildred Brown) convince them that crime is the easy way to get what you want.

IMDBS says “Negotiations with Jeff Bridges and Robert Blake to play the role of Bobby Lee broke down because of budget limitations, so Jack Conrad had the choice of canceling the shoot or playing the role himself.” I bet Conrad brought it up to them at a bar. They said, “Call my agent.” That was it.

This was filmed in the least affluent parts of the U.S. and has a hard scrabble, doomed feel about it. It’s not a great find, but it’s still interesting, made at a time when Bonnie and Clyde and essays on the downtrodden and their ruined lives were big screen fodder. Bank robberies, bad decisions, short tempers…you know how the song goes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)

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Directed and written by Ossie Davis, based on the book by Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem is an early blaxploitation film. It starts big and bold, as Deke “Reverend” O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart) is raising money for a ship to sail black people back to Africa when armed and masked men attack, stealing the cash. This brings on detectives “Gravedigger” Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Ed “Coffin Ed” Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) — who were in nine of Himes’ The Harlem Detective books — on the case. They see through O’Malley and despite their Nixon-respecting boss telling them to leave him alone, they do anything but.

His mistress, Iris Brown (Judy Pace), is being tracked by them and narrowly escapes them, only to find O’Malley in bed with Mabel (Emily Yancy), the wife of one of the men killed just hours ago in the robbery. The truth is that the preacher is working with white criminal Calhoun (J.D. Cannon) and the robbery was all a scam. The money is now in a bale of hay that’s been taken by scrap dealer Uncle Budd (Redd Foxx, always a junkman).  By the end, the bad guys get exposed and Uncle Budd makes his way to Ghana, where all that cash buys him a harem.

Davis didn’t make the sequel because of disagreements with the studio. That’s why Mark Warren made Come Back, Charleston Blue, a movie loosely based on Himes’ The Heat’s On.

A film made with the protection of John Shabazz and the Black Citizen Patrol, and one that pushes that self-determinism and the ghetto policing itself are the only ways out, was a volatile mix. It would be now, much less back in 1970.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Corruption (1968)

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As the trailer will tell you, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.

That’s debatable.

What is not is that Corruption is a ripoff of Eyes without a Face.

But hey — some of my favorite movies are total rip-offs.

Renowned plastic surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) starts the movie at a swinging 60s party with his beautiful fiancée Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Hysteria). Sir John isn’t dealing well with all this counterculture excess, so when a pervy photographer makes a pass at his girl, he attacks the man, sending a hot light into Lynn’s face. This party may seem like a parody when seen today, but this is a serious scene, with Cushing facing the Summer of Love and not dealing so well with all of it.

Rowan pledges to fix Lynn’s scarred face through a combination of laser technology and a pituitary gland transplant. Sound good? Well, it’s fueled by murder, giving the fluids of young women to his wife, to keep her face from scarring and it needs to be repeated again and again to stop the scars from coming back. Everything goes well — as well as repeatedly killing people and basically feeding their skin to your wife can go– until Sir John and Lynn try to seduce a new victim who ends up being part of a gang of robbers.

Those criminals break into the home of Sir John and they soon learn his secret. However, no one profits from this knowledge, as everyone ends up getting killed by a surgical laser. And then, get this — it’s all a dream!

Cushing would say, “It was gratuitously violent, fearfully sick. But it was a good script, which just goes to show how important the presentation is.” You have to love a movie where Van Helsing flips out at a party that Austin Powers would say is way too mod. And wow, it’s pretty gory for a late sixties British movie!

Director Robert Hartford-Davis would also make Incense for the Damned, Gonks Go Beat and The Fiend.

Also, just to remind you one more time, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.