Director Anthony Stephens and writer Tony Garcia may have few credits but they also made a sword and sorcery film for a budget of about what ten minutes of that Dungeons and Dragons flop coming out this year cost to shoot.

This was on Mill Creek’s Catacombs of Creepshows box set which probably used to sell for a buck at used stores and is now approaching $100 on eBay, thanks to having movies like Fungicide, Tartarus and Death Becomes Them on it.

This movie is so magical that every magic user yells “Fireball” before acting like they’re throwing a fireball and all that happens is that the video effect reverses the color and goes to black and white quickly and I kind of love that effect, one with no uncanny valley, one that people may say is cheap but it works.

An evil Necromancer (Charles Iceler) has been creating an army of zombies who barely have any blue tint but if they say they’re zombies, well…they are. They’re opposed by a thief named Dewin (Marie Noelle Marquis), a warrior woman called Nika (Stefanie Pschill), an adventurer (who very well could be a ranger but I didn’t have time to ask him his character class) and a priest in a pink robe who is pretty much a non-stop homophobic joke, but you know, 2004 was as much 18 centuries ago as it was 18 years.

There’s also a floating sword that looks great. Yeah, I get it. It’s an easy effect. But it was like being in a live action version of Gauntlet.

It’s incredible that in a world where Lord of the Rings can be watched in seconds that anyone would be brave enough to make their own fantasy movie with big aims and ideas in direct inverse relation to their budget. The costumes are great, the synth at the beginning just works and yeah, the swordfights are borderline child in the backyard, which says to me they didn’t fall into the logic of every other dungeon SOV (Song of the Sword, Way Bad Stone) and hire some renaissance faire people to stab one another.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Michael Wilcott (Simon Mosely) lost his parents in a plane crash and his brother to a murderer. Now, as he hunts down that man — instead of killing himself — he finds himself getting close to The Hidden. And yes, there’s another movie with the same title, but director Nathan Hill and writer Nick Goodman didn’t know that.

Everyone is as Australian as can be and if you are ready to work your way through the accents, you’ll also be rewarded by two shirtless men having an incredible fistfight on the side of a cliff. There’s also a cocaine addicted monster which is really a man in a bear suit, so this also has that going to for it.

I mean, this is a movie where a bear lives in the sewers and eats a man on coke, gets into coke and appears for one scene and you name it The Hidden. This is a movie that demands sheer insanity throughout and instead feels like teenagers trying to make a serious movie except that, yes let me say it again, it has a zooted-out bear in it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When someone tells you that The Blair Witch Project was the first found footage movie, they weren’t even the first in the 90s.

A parapsychology professor, his students and a psychic have locked themselves in the haunted Smith Garrett Building or Strawberry Estates. It’s one of the greatest challenges of psychics and parapsychologists and has become legendary. That’s because this is a place that really is packed with evil and there’s no way anyone is making it out alive.

The 1997 version had a different cast, which included Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause, but director and writer Ron Bonk went back and shot all of that all over again.

It’s long, there’s a lot of talking — I enjoyed the faith discussions more than you may — and there could be a lot of fat trimmed, but when it works, it works.

As you may know, I dislike most found footage movies, so the fact that I finished this 100-minute-long film speaks to the fact that it has something going for it.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from SRS.

Ulrich (Mark Gauthier) and Michael (Jarrett Parker) are brothers from the age of warriors and sorcerers. They get arrested for witchcraft and kidnapping Princess Luna (Devon Pierce), a crime they have nothing to do with. The real enemy is Salatin (Brendan Dillon Jr.) who has escaped with Luna to another dimension — Beastmaster 2 alert, it’s Los Angeles — and get back home, except that Ulrich ends up turning evil. Sorry to spoil that, as it’s the most original part of this.

David Marsh directed, wrote, produced, edited and did the special effects for this and well, he had a vision. Did the vision live up to what was in his head? Who can say? He somehow made this with hardly any budget, thousands of ideas, a cast of unknowns and extras who came from the Society for Creative Anachronism.

There’s a lot of fog, some awesome zombies, wizards who show up in mirrors and two out of time wizards screaming at cars (and one of them excited about how much more attractive sex workers are in 1989 than where he comes from).

You can watch this on YouTube.

Holy shit, this movie.

Gordon Hauge (Mark Redfield) gets fired, kicked out of his apartment and dumped by his wife Maggie (Gage Sheridan) all in one day, then wrecks his car and wakes up under attack by the Ragmen and Shadowmen of purgatory, the world between heaven and hell. He soon meets others who are trapped here because they ended their lives in a moment of noble sacrifice, all united in combat against the dreaded Despiser, a horrific blast of 2003 CGI that crashed into our planet when his spaceship slammed into Russia in 1908 and caused the Tunguska event.

Despiser feels like a Canadian movie but it’s made in Virginia.

It has the tones of a faith film but is packed with tons of violence.

And it feels like parts of The Wizard of Oz, The Stand and Lord of the Rings yet has so many strange ideas inside it that it feels like nothing else. Or, as the official site says, director and writer Philip Cook “was intrigued by the idea of an alternative world like ours, recognizable but skewed, dark and ominous—a blend of our culture mixed with macabre fantasy. This concept became the purgatory, a place where, after death, one’s soul is purified of sin—by suffering. But in this story, something has gone terribly wrong with it. It’s no longer a clearinghouse for confused souls; it’s become bottlenecked, out of balance and fraught with conflict.”

Keep in mind that this isn’t a movie with a multimillion-dollar budget but instead is a combination of green screen shot on video footage and all the CGI money could buy in 2003. If you liked the strange worlds that show up in Fungicide, good news. This goes even harder, if that’s possible. It feels like if you stare at it long enough, you’ll be able to see a sailboat in its pixels.

It even has some intriguing heroes beyond Gordon, like Nimbus (Doug Brown), a soldier who has been in purgatory since World War One, kamikaze pilot Tomasawa (Frank Smith), Jake (Michael Weitz) and Charlie Roadtrap (Tara Bilkins).

Joe Bob gave this three and a half stars and had these totals: “Forty-nine dead bodies. Five gun battles. Three crash-and-burns. Four motor vehicle chases. One sucker punch. Two body-transformation scenes. One hydrogen explosion. One Viking funeral. One peasant riot. Flaming church. Flaming car. Upside-down crucifixion. Grotesque insect destruction. Doll-stomping. Gratuitous shipwrecks. Kung Fu. Grenade Fu. Bazooka Fu.”

For those that look at the cover image for this and instantly think, “I need to know more,” or loved staring at blacklight posters at Spencer’s or played enough Gamma World, this is for you. It’s definitely for me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

How did I get so far into these SOV weeks without doing a W.A.V.E. Productions movie? W.A.V.E. is a New Jersey-based horror and custom video company that makes their own films as well as custom movies for pay with usually no limits. It’s kind of like pornography but at once less filthy and creepier. They claim to be inspired by the horror and exploitation movies of the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s and there’s adult content but never anything explicit.

So, if you wanted to see Sheena, Queen of the Jungle or Wonder Woman struggle and get tied up even more than they did in their comics or movies, well, this time W.A.V.E. has a movie for you.

That means when you watch Alexandria Solace (Dawn Murphy) run through the jungle and fall into quicksand, you’re going to watch her struggle for like seven minutes. If this turns you on, look, I’m not going to judge, but I have no idea how you would be able to fulfil your fantasies outside of W.A.V.E.

Rana (Pamela Sutch) is the heroine, a jungle girl battling hand puppet snakes and the remnants of the German army. Her greatest enemy is Ilsa Van Todd (Tina Krause, a W.A.V.E. superstar who went on to direct the incredible movie Limbo) and yeah, my admiration for Krause kind of made her the heroine of this whole thing.

This is made from three shorts: The Jungle Woman versus the Nazis, The Jungle Woman and the Flowers of Death and The Jungle Woman and the Fangs of Death. There are also trailers, extended footage of Murphy having a wardrobe issue in case you didn’t feel bad enough watching this and a song with the lyric “You can count on Rana to be your friend.”

Man, those Polonia boys are always getting in trouble. This time, John, Mark and their friend Todd Michael Smith start with the strangeness of Hallucinations and then decide there’s no way to go but all the way as they direct, write, star and survive this assault.

So yeah, the simple breakdown would be something like Alan and Joseph (Mark and John Polonia) plan on spending the summer with their Aunt Lacey, but soon run into Jeremy (Smith), one of the workers on her farm who just might be killing people.

Except that, well, Aunt Lacey is ready to take the virginity of either of her nephews, Jeremy isn’t just killing but keeping body parts and oh yeah, that scene where John craps out a full knife and screams in bloody underwear from Hallucinations comes back to destroy minds.

What can you say about a movie that begins with a man axe hacking a body to pieces, except for a hand that he uses it, well, give himself the ultimate stranger? Or when it comes out that the body of their uncle is in the house and their aunt still has sex with him? Or a fisting scene that ends with a killer forcing his victim to eat feces, all while Casio synth plaintively blasts?

This is amongst the most offensive and in your face SOV films I’ve ever seen — I haven’t even mentioned the golden shower or oral sex with a severed head scene, but you know, not everyone is ready nor should they need to be — and it’s amazing that the Polonias were teens making this and that Mark is still making movies today. This feels like the kind of movie that you need to watch with a room of people and see how many make it to the end.

There’s a moment in this movie where a date happens at the drive-in to watch Grave of the Vampire and that’s how you know this is a movie, because the girl in that scene is so impossibly gorgeous the fact that she’s down to go see Michael Pataki and eat in the car proves that this is either fantasy or she’s a dream demon of some sort.

Anyways — this is a brand new movie made to look old and yet I can’t hate it. Even when someone makes a smoothie out of a cat or it gets impossibly talky or too mean spirited, I still admire the DIY nature of it all, it still has Dave “The Rock” Nelson playing the role of Amber Lynn in Things and claymation credits and a segment about creepy crawling and that wins me over.

Made for about $5,000 by director and writer Bruce Longo, this also has a scene where the aforementioned girl shows off her tumor and dead mouse collection amongst her The Tomb of Ligeia poster. Women like this exist — I married one and you can’t have her — but not all that often.

Also: Bonus points for Pacey wearing a River’s Edge shirt.

This has the feel of real SOV, the kind made in backyards with no real budget, movies where weird kids got to be Herschell Gordon Lewis for a day and get their hands wet with animal guts and then upset all of their relatives who asked to watch it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As you watch this movie, keep in mind that twin brothers named Mark and John Polonia and their friend Todd Michael Smith were around seventeen. This movie is exactly the sheer mania that is inside the mind of a child about it be a man, as the three guys are all brothers in this, stuck at home as their mom is working multiple shifts just in time for a horrific monk to move in next door and destroy their fragile brains.

Todd is reading a book about Herschell Gordon Lewis. John is calling a sex line, because that’s what guys did in 1988 when there was no world wide web in the way we know it now. Mark is out shoveling snow. And then stuff gets absolutely bonkers: John craps out a blade that also castrates him; Mark ties up Todd and caresses his skin with a razor blade and, again, castration; John takes a shower — there’s no Hollywood attempt at hiding the male nudity — when a homemade — yet raw as fuck — penis monster assaults him. Also: an elf pisses in Mark’s face.

Man, what were these kids on? High on camcorders? This movie is filled with latent fear of post-puberty becoming a man and leaving the nest. And man, like all SOV, you get to be a psychiatrist, because there’s some definite trauma at the idea of homosexuality becoming a normal part of your life.  I have no idea if they intended this but even if not it’s all here on tape, stomach explosions, masked killers and authentic 80s beige haze everywhere.

You could gather all of Hollywood, give them all of the money and they would never make a movie this great. Or weird. Or with so much dick.

Some of this movie was remade into Splatter Farm, the movie the Polonias were at one time best known for, as well as the actual remake of this movie, Lethal Nightmare.

You can watch this on Tubi.