The Coma-Brutal Duel is one of two movies made by Heiko Fipper, along with Ostermontag or I Spit On Your Fucking Grave Bitch! If you think that you’ve seen everything there is to see when it comes to German ultragore shot on video movies, get ready.

Less a film than a series of shorts created between 1984 and 1999, this starts with Stephan Bandera losing his father to a drunk driver named John Eisentempler and enlisting an organized crime family to help him get revenge. It seems that the drunk driver won’t get any prison time, so Stephen pledges himself to the family and what follows is a calvalcade of carnage and human body destruction.

Only Heiko, the son of John, survives and just barely. He ends up in a coma that lasts ten years and walks into the sunset, only to be met by a still-alive Stephan and another bloody battle that takes out both of them.

He awakens, crucified, as the mob has their way with him while they bring Stephan back to life just as a zombie attacks. By the close, zombies are in nearly every scene as the leads continually battle over and over again until there can be only one alive.

Everyone was obviously having fun making this, no matter how tense some of the torture scenes get. How else can you explain characters scooping up their own brains, putting them back in their heads and getting back out to fight again? It’s like playing army in your old neighborhood where every wound magically heals except these ones send brown sprays of blood everywhere. It also has a mob made up of eight identical members, so at least it realizes how ridiculous it is, but those of a more delicate stomach may want to skip a movie that has a baby ripped out of a womb and stomped into oblivion.

In the year 2210, the world as we know it has been wiped out by a virus sent here by aliens — aliens that look like ninjas with pillowcases over their heads. Now, their leader Lord Gideon (Conrad Brooks, yes, from Ed Wood’s movies) has sent these alien ninjas to destroy the last two people alive, Jake (director and writer Jose Prendes) and Katherine Great (Denice Duff, Michelle Morgan from Bloodstone: Subspecies II and Bloodlust: Subspecies III and the director of Song of the Vampire; if you’re going to be alone with just one woman, you really are doing find if it’s Denice Duff).

Beyond Prendes being decent at kicking and punching, he was smart enough to go to a convention and pay Tom Savini and Linnea Quigley to do a scene, which is probably some of the reasons why some people watched this.

Prendes is still making movies, writing stuff like Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark and directing 2022’s Headless Horseman. He thanks marshmallows in the credits, which seems like the right thing to do after watching this.

Who would think of making Omega Man on the budget of what Will Smith drank in soda on each day of I Am Legend? Joe Prendes. That’s who.

The one and done directorial work of Felix Girard, Night of Terror was written by Renee Harmon, who went from being in an acting group in Texas with fellow Army officer’s wives to roles in Al Adamson’s Cinderella 2000 as well as Frozen Scream, Lady Streetfigher, Van Nuys Blvd., Jungle Trap and Hell Riders. She also stars Chris Nilsen, who is being kept in a mental hospital against her will by her philandering husband Alex (Henry Lewis) and Dr. Seymour Harper (Frank Neuhaus), who just wants to experiment on his patients in a very Hellhole scenario.

Her lawyer finally gets her released and she moves into the former home of Harper — bad idea — and becomes friends with Harper’s wife Ellen (Lynn Whitmire) — bad idea again — and stays there even after learning that Harper’s mistress Inez (Susette Andres) was killed there in the worst of all these ideas. If that doesn’t just beat all, there’s also a hooded would-be giallo killer in the form of Harper’s patient Paul Peterson (Steven Neuhardt) who is haunting the house as well.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this, we get to see Chris’ stepdaughter Becky (Lauren Brent) go to a pool party where a new wave band plays and by plays, I mean we hear the entire song and not just a clip of them.

As all of this is happening, Chris also meets Paul’s psychic mother Celeste (Arline Specht) who uses an Ouija board — oh man, Ouija and SOV in the same movie, alert my Letterboxd lists — to introduce our protagonist to her spirit guide Julian.

Obviously this was also produced by Harmon, so no one told her not to speak in an impenetrable accent — to be fair, she was born in Mannheim, Germany but had lived in the U.S. for some time and there’s usually always a second take but come on, there wasn’t we all know that — or play scenes from Frozen Scream as happening at the same time as this tale, despite that movie being made ten years or more before that.

That said, I kind of love this whole enterprise. From Paul wearing a full set of fancy pajamas while supposedly in a mental hospital — topped by the bald female patient who looks to be wearing an outfit from a combination fast food restaurant and Nickelodeon game show — this is a movie full of choices, so few of those choices being ones that make the slightest sense. It also has a Night Killer-level scene of its lead character having a long conversation with herself in a mirror and you know how much I love that.

This is also a film that ends with potential forced surgery and a ghost melting her face in front of everyone, as well as Paul being absolved of all the murders he’s committed and yet stalking our heroine in a twist sting that made me laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

Keep in mind as you watch this that Renee Harmon was an acting teacher in East Texas and yes, of course she was. She should have been. More people should make movies like Night of Terror, which is also called Escape from the Insane Asylum. There are Dutch angles, sure, but there’s also a scene where Harmon screams at herself and puts lipstick all over her face and man, that’s cinema.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Giovanni Arduino and Andrea Lioy, this Italian SOV* movie has a great title that there’s no way that it can live up to.

Bernie has been burnt up from being hit by a drunk driver so he remains high as much as possible and hides his injuries under a white Klan hood because the car was black. His receptionist sister Jenny, who everyone thinks is ugly but in no way looks that way, abuses him by repeatedly kicking him in the ballbag before injecting him with her urine, which gives her mental power over him. I think you have to pay for that kind of treatment.

There’s also a garage band called The Sick Rose that plays throughout the movie as Bernie kills everyone who has been tormenting his sister. I’m still trying to figure out the punk rock cop whose dad was a banana peel falling for cowboy.

It does have someone getting their face jammed into a meat slicer and several people cutting off their own dicks and then eating them. In case you wondered why I’m not the kind of reviewer who gets to be on Criterion blu rays and a talking head on Shudder shows, it’s because there’s no call for someone to discuss the best self-castration scenes in SOV movies.

I mean, regular Italian exploitation horror has scenes of eyeballs being destroyed, drill presses through people’s heads and people literally puking their guts out. Actually all of those things happen in City of the Living Dead. Just imagine how much more disgusting Italian filmmakers who aren’t really filmmakers are. That said, just imagine how many long stretches there are of this film there are where absolutely nothing happens.

*I get this was shot on Super 8 but you know what I mean when it comes to the quality. I know that I’ll get at least one letter if I don’t have this disclaimer.

Don Swan directed, wrote and produced one thing and this is it, the story of Gozu, a man damned to be alive forever but forced to feast on flesh, so why shouldn’t he share that with the rest of the world and start chopping up customers and serving it to other customers? For six hundred years, this is the way he’s been doing business, but at least now he’s figured out how to smoke out and wear comfy Hawaiian shirts in addition to masticating on people.

There’s a lot of 80s jazz — there’s a whole band playing live so this has commitment — and lots of women milling around Gozu’s beach restaurant, as well as some health inspectors and a cult called The Holy Order of the Righteous Brotherhood that has watched over the chef for centuries. Also: he is not a zombie, but that title is too good to play with. I guess if he doesn’t eat meat he turns into one.

One of the people he’s already devoured part of, Azog, stands outside the place and yells at people to avoid it. If he and the other hooded members of the Brotherhood are still alive are they eating flesh as well?

Filmed on location at Smokey Joe’s Cafe in Charlotte — which is still open, so eat there at your own discretion — this movie shopped local, as it has dancers from the Paper Doll Lounge. The fact that this business still operates more than forty years later proves that people in North Carolina know how to support mom and pop (and probably a lot of single moms) businesses.

I wrote for a burger restaurant for a few months and they always called out how they didn’t have freezers and ground their meat fresh every day. Goza’s Deli and Beach Club can claim the same thing but perhaps even better — or worse — because some of their ingredients are so fresh they’re still crawling around the plate.

The main drama kicks in when a girl named Stella disappears. Her man Jerry tries to get Tracy, a meat packing hard drinking girl who tells every man to “fuck off,” to help, but she just gets co-opted by Gozu, joins his side and kills the dude who may have been our protagonist. Stella’s roommate Missy, however, may be the prophesized high priestess destined to destroy Gozu.

The sad part of it all is that this movie is aware of itself and if it weren’t, it would be amazing. At least the box art is incredible.

N.G. Mount also directed Ogroff and Dinosaur from the Deep and he’s back here to tell the story of a super soldier that should be able to help their side win the war, but then you discover that he was built by Major Taylor who is really Jean Rollin and man, if you get a robot brain from the man known for fog, castles and haunted women heading for doom, chances are all you’re going to care about is catching some of those women. He’s the alien in the title. There is no platoon of aliens. There aren’t any aliens at all.

There are a lot of reviews that ask, “Why is Jean Rollin in this?”

This isn’t the only SOV video he was in directed by Mount. He’s also in Dinosaur from the Deep and the Reanimator remake remix rip-off Trepanator.

If you’re up for a movie that outcheaps Robowar, good news. This is it as the world’s greatest soldiers go into the German jungle to destroy the former criminal — the Fast Food Killer — turned cyborg called alien.

Yes, it’s as dumb as it sounds. Watch it.

On the evening of October 8, 1983, the Van Heese family gathered to celebrate the birthday of 5-year-old Michelle. As the mother and her three sons Eric, Jason and Michael celebrated along with Eric’s wife Jamie and Jason’s girlfriend Renee, they soon had to solve a power outage. When the brothers went outside, they noticed a red light in the sky. And that’s when things went bad quickly, as red lights in the sky, an alien craft and even beings were recorded by Michael’s video camera.

Except, you know, this was all a found footage shot on video film by director and writer Dean Alioto, who used just $6,500 to make the film. The master tape burned in a warehouse fire shortly after being picked up for distribution, so this was a rare film for some time. In 2018, Alioto released the film on DVD and digital, then AGFA released a  blu ray that’s the best way to see this movie.

So many UFO lovers thought that this was real footage and the 1990s show Encounters even claimed that it was real footage. That’s because the bootlegs that were circulating had no credits. That’s where The McPherson Tape name comes from, as this was really named Alien Abduction. It was remade in 1998 as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County.

The film feels a lot like the real life Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter — which I have also heard called the Hopkinsville Goblins Case — in which the communities of Kelly and Hopkinsville in Christian County, Kentucky battled several goblin-looking extraterrestrials. It’s one of one of the most significant and well-documented cases in the history of UFO incidents, even if the Air Force classified it as a hoax in Project Blue Book. Night Skies, which became E.T., and Critters were based on this story.

Kind of lost until Saturn’s Core reissued this on VHS a few years ago, this movie mixes both comedy and horror with dialogue that feels like it’s the first time that anyone has even seen the script. It concerns Video Magic clerk Ramon — there’s a poster for Goldengirl up like 12 years after that movie came out — whose boss Joe believes is a killer because one of the videos in their store has someone getting killed on tape. The real killer? Now he’s coming to take out Ramon.

Under the names John Bacchus and Zachary Snygg, this movie’s director has made stuff like The Erotic Witch Project, Play-Mate of the Apes, The Insatiable IronBabe and Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell. He’s still at it, too.

I’m sure his later movies are better. They have to be. This, however, is a bunch of teenagers grabbing a camera and trying to show you how hilarious they aren’t.

Yet somehow, as bad as the story and the dialogue is, the camerawork is inventive even on the lowest of budgets. It’s as if some teenagers overdosed on Sam Raimi and the Coen Brothers and that’s because that’s exactly what this is.

I really like Todd Sheets, because he seems like someone just as willing to passionately discuss his favorite Fulci movie as he is someone ready to make something astounding like Moonchild. He may not be the biggest fan of this movie and sees a lot he could have done better — or so he says — but I had a blast watching it. It made me feel like when I was a teenager and all I cared about was reading Fangoria and driving to other towns to find mom and pop video stores with different libraries of horror movies than the ones I’d exhausted around me.

This movie is exactly what I was looking for.

The plot is simple but that’s just to get the creature into our world and killing everyone he can. A farmer named Romero once wanted his crops to do better so he tried some magic and ended up with, well, a goblin. So he dropped it in a well and years later, when a young couple buys the place, they accidentally unleash it, as you do, and things go wrong for everyone and right for you, the viewer.

So yeah, I would have been 21 when this came out and that was the perfect time for me to enjoy Fulci references, heavy metal soundtracks and people just randomly showing up and trying to speak dialogue that they are ill-prepared to deliver and they still end up sounding like every art school party I ever attended with the cheapest bottle of vodka in my hand.

Now, wondering like why a goblin needs a drill to take out someone’s eyeball is the kind of thing that people wonder about when they get too intellectual about movies like this. Other questions would be why is there so much genital mutilation and why do zombies just show up? These are dumb questions no one cares about. Stop asking questions. Stop making sense.

The goblin looks great, the music is pretty solid and the video quality is absolutely horrible. The guts look like real animal parts which is how they do it in Texas on productions big and small, but this was made in Kansas City. They have good barbecue in both places and I guess the sloppiness of the sauce on the meat translates to how grimy the guts look in horror films too. Why is this movie making me hungry instead of nauseated? Have I gone too far?

This was shot under a full moon with a video camera. That’s as perfect as life gets.

Say no to drugs. Get high on horror!

Frank Meyer was a homeless guy in real life and that’s who he is in this movie, a man who lives in the warehouse of a trucking company where he’s abused by his co-workers most of the time. He also dreams of death and man, it’s not pretty. This is a film desperate to chase away nearly everyone, starting with him smashing a kid’s head open with a pipe, running over her body with a truck and then messily devouring her brain.

Still here?

This was released by Sub Rosa in 2004 after being an underground VHS passaround film and if you’re ready for the kind of weirdness you once needed multiple mixtapes to see, this is it. The guys at the truck garage — introduced in a hilarious pause to see the names Reservoir Dogs style moment — decide to throw him a birthday party and some geeky dude interrupts it. Frank remembers that his mother told him to never lie and always tell people before he kills them. So when Frank tells someone that he’s going to cut off their head and shit down their neck, well, it’s no threat. It’s a promise that we’re going to see.

For a movie that has a man searching for love — alright, gigantic breasts — and killing women left and right, this ends with a sweetness that’s kind of heartwarming if you can get past every moment of sheer black humored piss in your drink madness. I mean, as bad as Frank can be, at least he follows up on his promises and has some cats that he loves, Herman, Frankie, Lily, Mommy and The Maltese Cat.

This was directed, written, produced, edited and shot by Escalpo Don Balde who is really Steve Ballot. Frank starts by telling us that this is a story of love and evil and man, he wasn’t lying. It’s not a road that many will want to travel, but it’s Herschell Gordon Lewis, John Waters and more than anything Bloodsucking Freaks, a movie that you’ll rush to shut off the moment anyone walks in the room excapt that you’re an adult now.

Ballot told Film Threat that the movie was made with his family: “My family had a warehouse business with forklifts, tractor-trailers, truck drivers, warehouse workers and a 133,000 square foot building. I could use all that. There was a former homeless man that the company adopted and let live in the back room. He would be the star. I had a 5-year-old niece that was the cutest little kid in the world. I would start the movie with her. My pot dealer was a classic Brooklyn tough guy. I could use him too. And like John Waters before me, I could cast the movie with weirdos I met on the street. So I started shooting with my $1100 consumer JVC SVHSC camera on the weekends. I shot about forty SVHSC tapes over a four year period, and then spent about six months editing it together with two VCRs.”

You read that right. The little girl that dies in the beginning is his niece.

I can’t even imagine the rest of the footage that didn’t make it into this movie.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.