Ted Farrell (Matt Felmlee) loves a mystery. As a college student and singing telegram actor, he goes from creating an audio thriller into one of his own, as a gorgeous woman named Jennifer (Loreal Steiner) ends up near death in his car. Soon, her last boyfriend Jeff (Jeff Tatum) and his friend Vic (Chris Hall) are stalking him. Can he stay one step ahead?

Directed by the team of James Groetsch, Shawn Korby and Bill Weiss, this is a suspenseful story that is anything but a student film, even if it’s one made by students. Shot on Super 8, it seems to never stop moving or to get boring, always keeping the viewer guessing what happens next.

Plus, seeing as how it’s a movie about someone who tells stories with sound, it has plenty of audio design that moves the tale forward. Here’s to another great find by Visual Vengeance, who have perhaps their most ambitious animated menu to date and, as always, hours of extras.

A very rare regional horror thriller from the late 1980s video store era, The Wrong Door enjoys its first time ever on disc and a brand new 2K transfer from the original Super 8 elements.

This Visual Vengeance blu ray has a brand new director-supervised 2K transfer from original Super 8 film elements with extras that include two commentary tracks, one with directors Bill Weiss and Shawn Korby and a second with director James Groetsch and producer John Schonebaum. There’s also a new documentary Men Make Movie, If Not Million$, interviews with Groetsch, Korby, Weiess and actor Matt Felmlee; an interview with Chris Gore; an alternate director’s cut; two Super 8 shorts, Raiders of the Lost Bark and The Pizza Man, an episode of The Gale Whiteman Show; the original unedited Muther Video VHS intros; an image gallery; trailers; storyboards; a limited edition slipcase and door hanger; a reversible sleeve with original VHS art and a “stick your own” VHS sticker set.

You can get this from MVD.

I’m struggling to find a complete copy of this movie, but when I read the words “shot on video Greek remake of Maniac,” I have to share some of it.

The Strangler of Syngrou was directed by Dimitris Tzelas and written by Alexandros Diamantis. It stars Apostolos Souglakos in the role that Joe Spinell made famous. Diamantis was a professional wrestler who didn’t just moonlight as an actor. He also recorded two comedy rap albums.

He plays Angel, a man who was abused by his mother as a child who grew into a larger and more muscular man that got a job as a mannequin maker. He got married to a woman named Mary who sadly died and to keep her in his life, he creates a life-size doll of her that stays in bed all day and has now taken on the voice and behavior of his mother, belittling him and telling him what to do.

That “what to do” is kill women at night then leave behind a rose and make a doll of them that he keeps in his apartment along with Mary.

It also is packed with nudity — from men, women, transgender actors and Diamantis — and has its lead dress as a woman for several scenes.

So yes, while I can’t find the full video — yet — I have some clips, including one that has disco dancing at a club filled with neon called Barbarella and Angel speaking in the ear of his doll lover. This one has three minutes of more disco dancing while another has two streetwalkers smoking and talking. I also found this English dubbed comedy trailer.

Making this even more interesting is that it outright rips off music like Vangelis’ work on the Blade Runner soundtrack, Giorgio Moroder’s Cat People soundtrack, Swiss synthpop singer Daphné Hendrickx AKA Do Piano singing “Again” and “Simply the Best” by Tina Turner. There’s also a porn VHS within the movie called Mondo New Wave Harlots — alert Gregory Dark and the estates of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco E. Prosperi — that are inserts, giving this movie hardcore scenes.

If you have this movie, please let me know. I don’t know if anything has been more created for more consumption.

Sources

Theater of Guts: Strangler of Syggrou

The Horror Bar: The Strangler of Syggrou

Provocateur: Apostolos “left” early, but he managed to leave us an unimaginably cult legacy

Three days after the zombie outbreak, Bill Johnson (Pablo Parés), John West (Berta Muñiz) and Max Giggs (Hernán Sáez) are being chased by a UFO which has locked onto a zombie being carried by John. That ship’s tractor beam pulls him into the ship and transforms him (Berta lost a ton of weight between the last movie and this one) all while the team comes up with a plan of turning a zombie into a bomb that will be dragged up into their ship.

Then, each of the group gets split up and has their own stories to deal with. John discovers he has lost his strength after being transformed and must deal with doubt. Bill seeks out renegade agent Jack Taylor (Walter Cornás) to discover how to find the alien mothership. Giggs finds a zombie to be his bomb, but he soon finds himself feeling like a father to the shambling dead thing he calls Junior (Paulo Soria).

In the years since the Plaga Zombie series started, CGI has become more affordable, which makes this movie look way better than the first two movies. Also: all zombie movies may not need a musical number, but seeing as how good the one here is, maybe they should.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the whole set from Severin.

Just minutes after the end of Plaga Zombie, the sequel lets us know that the Argentine government is working with the alien zombies in exchange for protection from the dreaded virus that has started to change the world.

Only Bill Johnson (Pablo Parés), John West (Berta Muñiz) and Max Giggs (Hernán Sáez) have survived the initial outbreak and they are to be released back into their overrun neighborhood. That is unless Agent James Dana (Esteban Podetti) and his death squad don’t kill them first.

If you follow the river of blood and gore, you go from Sam Raimi to Peter Jackson to this film, which delights in showing ways that zombie bodies can be desiccated, destroyed and decimated. And if you love wrestlers beating up the undead, well, John West has an entire musical number where he explains how tough he is and how much he loves to rekill the living dead.

Anyone who doesn’t like this movie has no idea how to have fun. I’ve read some reviews that say, “Well, it gets complicated” or “It’s too long.” I have no idea how one can be critical of a movie where a zombie has its intestines torn out and then sprays diarrhea all over the place. I mean, how many Merchant Ivory movies can give us that? This is pure joy, made by people who are in love with making it. Just sit back, shut off your hypercritical mind and enjoy what they have made for you.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the entire series from Severin.

Plaga Zombie was created by Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez, who made the first version of the movie with a home video camera and some high school friends. At the age of 17, they worked with Berta Muñiz to make the first version of the movie that was released in theaters. The sequel, Plaga Zombie: Zona Mutante, have a higher budget — well, $3,000 versus a few hundred — but took a toll on the crew. Plaga Zombie: Zona Mutante – Revolución Tóxica, the last in the trilogy, was the result of the crew falling apart. Their grup therapist suggested they make the movie but as far as I’ve learned, they didn’t remain friends.

But ah, Plaga Zombie, directed by Parés and Sáez, who wrote the film with Muñiz, is a magic time. Med student Bill Johnson (Parés), pro wrestler John West (Muñiz) and nerdy Max Giggs (Sáez) are trapped in a zombie outbreak caused by aliens. That’s a simple description of what follows, as this is the best $120 ever spent.

This is 67 minutes that recall the best of Peter Jackson’s early career — it’s literally Bad Taste mixed with Dawn of the Dead — and this is just a start for the delirious insanity that the second film in the series will bring.

You can get all three movies on the Intervision box set or watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Allen Wright and written by Kenneth Ward and Jim Baskin, who plays lead Sgt. Buddy Douglas, Slow Bullet is a wild ride because at first, you may think it’s a simple Rambosploitation movie but instead, it seems like it’s a rumination of a life destroyed by Vietnam, but then it’s also a showcase for some Florida metal bands and yes, then it goes back to the jungle.

For most of that first half, Buddy remembers his old L.R.R.P. (Long Range Recon Patrol) team in Vietnam and how they started to become animals, even assaulting a dead woman at one point while being taken apart by a Viet Cong sniper. This plays out while we watch Buddy fall to pieces inside the storage shed that he lives in, often spray painting the walls in an enclosed area. 

Buddy also has a girlfriend that he spends a lot of time having sex with — more on that in a few moments — and having montages with that — spoiler warning — he eventually shoots thinking he’s killing that sniper back in Nam.

Speaking of that phrase, the song “Back In Nam” by Vendetta plays numerous times in the movie. They also contributed the song “Nightmares” while Convicted did the songs “Slow Bullet,” “Still Waitin'” and “Bang, Bang.” It’s amazing how much thrash is in this, but then again, it was made in Florida in 1988.

A few years back, Rogue Riffers posted about this film. Brian Coghill, who did some of the effects for the film, discussed some of the reasons why it’s so strange: “There’s an entire reason why the flashback scenes were done in this acid-trippy look to them. A lot of the stuff they did was mistakes. The hooch we blew up, the shack, that there’s an explosion scene in, that was five gallons of diesel and gasoline and a mortar with black powder in it, and they forgot to filter the camera on that one and completely over exposed it. So what they did was posterize all the video that had to do with those flashbacks so they could use the explosions, but the napalm run was too strong — they couldn’t do it. They had set about 200 gallons of gasoline — they had the fire department on standby — and created this beautiful tornado of fire in the woods, absolutely gorgeous explosion, and it never saw the film.”

It’s also insinuated that the sex scenes between Buddy and Kate (Lisa Leonard) are real and, well, they don’t look fake.

But even better, Jim Baskin responded to their post and he shined all kinds of light on the production, saying ” I never had full sex with that actress altho she wanted it.” and “The movie sucked, the acting sucked even tho Kenny (25th Infantry Div. 1966-67 Vietnam and myself (173d Airborne Brigade Vietnam 1966-1968 and 196th LIB Vietnam 1971-1972) and I tried our best to make it accurate the best we could.”

The guys from that site seemed to reach out to Jim and hope to speak with him. It doesn’t look like they ever connected. I’ve been trying to hunt the team that made this to learn more and it looks like Kenneth Ward died last year. If anyone has any info, man, I’m dying to know more about how this was made.

It was shot in Knoxville and Seymour, Tennessee and Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s astounding because it’s one actor who obviously has PTSD — Baskin confirmed that in the above linked message — flipping out while remembering the past, but also a series of music videos to promote bands. All shot on video! That’s what makes this stand out from the world of Namsploitation, which is usually confined to the Philippines and huts getting blown up without much introspection.

You can watch this on YouTube.

John Michael McCarthy has made movies like Superstarlet A.D., The Sore Losers, Teenage Tupelo and oh yeah, he’s the man who found Bat Pussy. This is his first film, the story of the daughter of Helvis (Brady Debussey), a rock and roll god who is being opposed by the end of the world church run by Black Jesus (Adimu Ajanaku). He orders them to kill schoolgirl Isla M. (Sherry Lynn Garris, Gorewhore) before she is able to embrace her destiny and free her daddy from his pyramid tomb and help him destroy the Woofman (also Adimu Ajanaku; a lot of people think Jesus becomes a wolfman or a zombie and I don’t think that’s the intention).

Isla is nearly murdered by one of Black Jesus’ women, Candy (Ghetty Chasun from Red Lips!) and this leads to her being reborn as Damselvis, covering herself in leather and fringe, jumping on a motorcycle bound for Memphis to spread the singing gospel.

Oh the people you will meet, Damselvis! Like the wheelchair riding, former guitar playing and stunt death defying Evel Knievelvis (Robert Gann, who did the effects for this movie, Gorotica and Basket Case 2). A nude woman who tempts you in the woods! And oh, the soundtrack! The glorious fuzzy loudness!

Originally a comic book, this movie had no budget and more ideas than every other film you will watch this year put together. This was shot by Hugh Gallagher (Gorgasm), has a zombie Elvis that has one gigantic eye like a live action Big Daddy Roth cartoon and a creator who was brave enough to not only make it, but to try and get Lisa Marie Presley to play the lead.

This is the best $2,000 anyone has ever spent.

You can get this on blu ray from Saturn’s Core, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome.