Dutch director Dick Maas started his career directing the videos for Golden Earring, including “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles,” which was controversial as it showed a man about to assault a nun. He moved into feature films, including the comedic Flodder and The Lift. He’s also known for the American version of The Lift, which was called Down, and the absolutely deranged holiday movie Sint.

This film is at the crossroads of giallo and slasher, using the canals of Amsterdam instead of Venice to create a place where the killer can appear at seemingly any time and place to murder at will.

The film starts with a bravura scene of violence, as a prostitute is murdered and then her body, hung above a bridge, literally rains blood on to a boat full of tourists.

What keeps it from being giallo and pushes it toward slasher is the fact that its protagonist is not a stranger in a strange land, but instead Eric Visser, a detective struggling to be a single father while solving cases around Holland’s capital.

And what pushes it even further into slasher territory is the film’s propensity to deliver on the gore, from decapitated heads to bloody kills. The antagonist is so brutal that one of the witnesses refers to him as a monster that came out  of the water.

That said, where it does flirt with the giallo are the sheer number of red herrings that this movie throws at you, which makes sense, as Holland’s fishing industry continually lands plenty of them from the nutrient-rich coastal waters of the North Sea.

You can watch this on Shudder and Tubi.

The second part of the Bloodthirsty trilogy — three unrelated Toho-produced vampire movies all directed by Michio Yamamoto — Lake of Dracula shares the Hammer-inspired look of the other two films, looking as gorgeous as only Technicolor-hued skies can make happen. It transplants the gothic feel of British horror squarely into teh Far East with style.

When she was five, Akiko had a nightmare of losing her dog inside a crumbling mansion until she watched a vampire (Shin Kishida, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla) drain the blood of a woman. Now an adult, she finds herself back in the grip of that very same vampire, as he arrives in a white coffin, fully prepared to finally claim her.

He starts by taking her friend Kusaku and sister Natsuko as his thralls. As Doctor Takashi Saki has become involved in the case, he saves her as her sister expires in the sunlight of a beach, begging for her corpse to be burned so that she may never return. However, they take her to the morgue where she rises again from the dead, now a full vampire ready to help her new master take her sister once and for all.

If you watched this in Japan, the vampires all disintegrate at the end of this movie. When it was edited for American television, they just fade away.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or buy the entire Bloodthirsty Trilogy from Arrow Video.

Man, talk about a movie that is out to assault its audience. The poster for this says, “The shocking nature of the subject matter prohibits revealing the frightening transformation that occurs in this film.”

They aren’t kidding.

This is one of those legendary HBO movies that kids breathlessly described in my grade school classes, daring one another to watch and others claiming that it was so frightening that they kept seeing the monster from the movie in their windows.

Yeah. I can see why.

Directed by future Howling sequel maker Philippe Mora, written by Tom Holland and based on Edward Levy’s 1981 novel, Eli (Ronny Cox, RoboCop) and Caroline MacCleary (Bibi Besch, Meteor, Who’s That Girl) get stuck out on an abandoned road just as some kind of inhuman monster tries to break free. It escapes, brutalizes Caroline and gets shot.

Seventeen years later, whatever it was has a son. And he’s slowly growing sicker.

Before you can debate a woman’s right to choose, their son Michael is eating and murdering everyone he can get close to. That’s because he’s now possessed by Billy Connors, the man who is really his father, a cannibal who has left behind an entire mass grave of gnawed up bones.

This movie is basically an excuse for that aforementioned transformation scene, which is amongst the most pus-ridden and disgusting moments of filmmaking the world has ever seen. In short, it’s awesome and worth watching the rest of this movie just to witness its power.

There are also some awesome foreign titles for this movie. In France, it’s known as Les Entrailles de l’enfer (The Entrails of Hell), while in Germany it’s called  The Angel Face: Three Nights of Horror.

A great cast of supporting players has been assembled, including R.G. Armstrong (Pruneface from Dick Tracy), Don Gordon (The Towering Inferno), L.Q. Jones (yes, the director of A Boy and His Dog) and a young Meshach “Hollywood” Taylor as a deputy. Paul Clemens, who plays the monstrous child of the MacCleary’s, was also in the Sybil Danning movie They’re Playing With Fire.

I can say one more nice thing: the poster for this movie is beyond great. It’s still striking and makes me want to watch this movie again nearly forty years after it was designed.

I don’t think we’ve ever covered a Finnish movie before, much less one with a werereindeer, which I didn’t even think was something. You learn something new every day and movies help you do it.

At the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, this movie won Best Fairy Tale film from a Jean Cocteau-led jury. I also didn’t even know there was a Best Fair Tale award.

This is probably the only movie out there based on pre-Christian Finnish mythology and Sami shamanism, so enjoy it. Mirjami Kuosmanen — director Erik Blomberg’s wife who sadly died young from a brain hemorrhage — plays Pirita, a bride who misses her husband Aslak while he away herding reindeer.

She wants to ignite passion in her life and keep her husband home, so she visits a shaman. In turn, he turns Pirita — who was born of a witch — into a shapeshifting vampiric white reindeer. All she had to do was sacrifice the first thing she saw when she returned home, which ends up being the baby deer that her husband has brought her as a gift.

Now, she is irresistible to all men, men who she lures as the reindeer into the woods and then drains them of their blood.

The White Reindeer is the kind of magical movie that slowly finds its way into your mind and then takes a place inside it.

According to the Spaghetti Western Database, lead actor Chen Lee may have been a Japanese karate instructor, but according to director Mario Caiano (Eye In the Labyrinth), he worked in a laundry, not in a dojo, and was picked because he looked like a young Dustin Hoffman. Some think his real name was Mioshini Hayakawa, which is Japanese, not Chinese. That said, if that being racist — not knowing the difference between two countries nearly 1,900 miles away from one another — then this movie is not for you.

Seriously, nearly every race gets denigrated in this movie audibly and physically. Luckily, Shanghai Joe ends up killing every single offender.

Also — the Bruno Nicolai music — recycled from Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay — is so good you’ll want to stick around for the whole movie.

Shanghai — or Chin Hao — has come to this country and instead of finding whatever it is he’s looking for — he has tattoos much like Kwai Chang Caine — he’s found that aforementioned racism and a love interest in Cristina (Carla Romanelli, Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen, The Lonely Lady).

Our hero’s skills as a fighting man make their way to cattle rancher Stanley Spencer (Piero Lulli, Kill, Baby…Kill!), who is really enslaving Mexicans to do his work. That means that the bad guys decide to kill him, but none of them can get it done.

Spencer ends up hiring four different killers, much like video game bosses, to do his work for him. There’s Tricky the Gambler (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Pedro the Cannibal (Robert Hundar, Sabata), Buryin’ Sam (Gordon Mitchell, who improvised and sang the song “Chin-Chin Chinaman” while carrying a shovel to try to kill Shanghai) and Scalper Jack (an astonishing Klaus Kinski, who is obsessed with hair and you genuinely fear for the life of Romanelli in their scene).

Finally, Mikuja, the only person who has the same martial arts technique and tattoo as our hero, is hired to kill him. Their battle may not be a fight on the order of a Shaw Brothers technical battle, but it’s still fun.

This movie is incredibly strange, because every time I thought it was going to be normal, it would go from slapstick to our hero plucking out a bad guy’s eye and blood spraying all over the place. It’s closer to a horror film set in the West with martial arts than a straight-up Italian Western, but it’s better for that difference.

Totally recommended.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.