Can director and writer Joe Sarno do a title or what?

The story begins with Marcia (Tamara Glynn), a young woman from the country, hitchhiking her way to the city. She isn’t the typical wide-eyed waif; she is acutely aware of the power of her appearance. When a driver picks her up, she essentially trades sex for a safe ride and a bit of cash, viewing it as a simple transaction to reach her goal. She is headed toward a roadhouse where her sister, Vicky, works as a hostess and has promised her a job.

Upon arriving at the roadhouse, Marcia learns the dark truth: Vicky has been murdered. The method was particularly brutal. She was strangled with her own silk garter belt.

Rather than fleeing in terror or going to the police, who are largely in the pocket of the local elite, Marcia decides to step directly into her sister’s shoes. She takes the hostess job at the roadhouse, moving into the same room where Vicky lived, effectively becoming the new Vicky to draw the killer out of the shadows.

As Marcia works the floor, she discovers that the roadhouse is a front for the secret desires of the town’s most respectable citizens. She begins a dangerous game of manipulation with all of them. And as for the Garterbelt Strangler, it isn’t just a random maniac; the motive is tied to the corruption and secret lifestyles of these powerful men. Marcia finds herself increasingly imperiled as she realizes that her sister was murdered because she knew too much about a specific civic leader’s proclivities.

The film culminates in a claustrophobic confrontation where Marcia’s life is threatened by the same lace instrument that killed her sister. In true Sarno fashion, the resolution is less about justice and more about the survival of the craftiest person in the room, leaving the viewer with a bleak look at the hunger that drives both the powerful and the desperate.

Kelly (Jeanne Bell, the second black Playboy Playmate in October 1969, the first to be on the cover in January 1970 — with four other black Playmates — and also the first to be on the cover by herself in October 1971; she’s also TNT Jackson) and Anggie (Rosanne Katon, Playboy Playmate September 1978; The Swinging Cheerleaders) are pirates who steal from rich tourists and give to poor people. Then, the Justice Department finds Kelly and lets her know that her sister Sandra has been taken by drug dealer Monteiro (Tony Carreon). If the pirates can get into his plantation and get info, they’ll get immunity for all their past crimes.

They break in, join up with a prisoner, Marcie (Trina Parks, Darktown Strutters), and the bad guy’s woman, Serena (Jayne Kennedy, Body and Soul), then work on blowing the base up real good. That’s because Sandra had already been killed when she tried to escape. Well, the girls try to make it out, but not everyone is on the right side.

Cirio Santiago directed this, Cyril St. James wrote it, and Dimension Pictures released it in the U.S. It’s a combination of women-in-prison and blaxploitation films. I wish it had more tension or reasons to tell you it’s a must-see, but it’s interesting for the leads all being black and otherwise. It has long scenes of padding when you want all the madness of a WIP film. The chase kicks some of that off, but this seems to have all of the ingredients of a firecracker — speaking of Firecracker, that’s a much better Santiago film — but then the fuse sputters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Depending on where you found this tape in the 70s, it went by a dozen different names. In Spain, it was the poetic Una gota de sangre para morir amando (A Drop of Blood to Die Loving); in France, the nonsensical Le bal du vaudou (The Voodoo Ball); and in the UK, it was slapped with the grindhouse titles Clockwork Terror or Murder In a Blue World.

It’s director and co-screenwriter Eloy de la Iglesia’s take on a future world that at times may feel very 1973 but also feels way more 2022 than we may want to admit.

To understand this movie, you have to understand De la Iglesia. A member of the Spanish Communist Party and an openly gay man living under the iron-fisted censorship of dictator Francisco Franco, his films weren’t just entertainment. They were Molotov cocktails. He specialized in Quinqui cinema, focusing on delinquency, social protest and the grit of the marginalized. Murder In a Blue World is another of his assaults on the status quo.

Sue Lyon (yes, Kubrick’s original Lolita) stars as Anna Vernia, a dedicated nurse by day who spends her nights acting as the “adistic homosexual killer the police are panicking over. In a stroke of brilliant irony, Anna collects pop art and even owns a copy of the novel Lolita. When she isn’t working, she lures gorgeous young men back to her apartment, sleeps with them and then—inspired by the rhythm of their post-coital heartbeats—slices them open with a scalpel.

She’s dating Dr. Victor Sender (Victor Sorel), a man convinced he can cure the rampant crime in their futuristic city through aggressive electroshock therapy. It’s a classic battle of ideologies: Victor wants to lobotomize the violence out of society, while Anna is the violence society created.

De la Iglesia doesn’t just tip his hat to Stanley Kubrick; he steals the hat and wears it. Early in the film, a family settles in to watch A Clockwork Orange on TV before being brutally attacked by a motorcycle gang.

Enter David (Chris Mitchum), a gang member with a conscience who gets beaten and expelled by his peers. After witnessing Anna disposing of a corpse, David decides to play a dangerous game of blackmail. He doesn’t want to turn her in; he wants her money to buy a motorcycle. It’s a strange, psychosexual cat-and-mouse game between a survivor of the streets and a high-society predator.

When David’s old gang leaves him for dead, he ends up in Victor’s hospital, slated for the doctor’s redemption treatment. Anna, having developed a twisted affection for the boy, realizes she can’t let the state take his soul. In a haunting finale, she reads Edgar Allan Poe to him, choosing to end his life on her own terms while Victor’s patients lose their minds in the background. It’s a bleak, beautiful bath in some dystopian dread.

I love how this movie somehow combines the ancient future of the 70s with the trapping of giallo. This is a strange and wonderful film that I plan on going back to several times.

If there is one thing you need to know about The Hammer, it’s that Fred Williamson doesn’t wait for permission. While most actors are content to sit in their trailers waiting for lighting setups, Fred was busy staging a cinematic heist.

The story goes that while filming Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards (the one Tarantino loved so much he borrowed the title), Fred realized he had a crew, a camera and a weekend. Every Friday, he’d essentially kidnap the production equipment and go shoot his own movie. He spent the weekdays writing the script on the fly and Saturdays and Sundays playing the baddest man in Italy.

In Mr. Mean, Fred plays the titular character, a high-stakes hitman hired by a former Cosa Nostra heavy to take out a guy named Ranati (Stelio Candelli). Ranati is the kind of low-life even the Mob can’t stand. He’s running fake charities to steal from the poor. It’s bad for the brand, see? But once the job gets moving, Mr. Mean finds out he’s being set up by the very people who cut him the check.

This has that greasy, gritty Euro-crime aesthetic thanks to the Italian locations, but it’s injected with the soul of a Blaxploitation epic. Speaking of soul, The Ohio Players show up as themselves and provide a soundtrack that absolutely drips with funk.

Is the plot a little messy? Sure. That’s what happens when you write a movie on a Tuesday and film it on a Sunday. But you aren’t watching this for a tight screenplay; you’re watching it for Fred Williamson looking cool in a leather jacket, Raimund Harmstorf as a heavy named Rommell and the sheer audacity of a film made behind the backs of another production’s producers.

Mr. Mean is the ultimate DIY action flick. It feels like a beautiful accident, a collision between the Italian Poliziotteschi genre and the American badass archetype. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Jonathan Kaplan was racking up critical acclaim for Heart Like a Wheel or The Accused, he was a king of the drive-in circuit. We’re talking a blistering run of exploitation gold: Night Call Nurses, The Student Teachers, The Slams, Truck Turner and White Line Fever. But even the best directors have a car crash moment. On an episode of  Trailers From Hell, Kaplan didn’t mince words, calling this movie “the biggest failure of his career.“

Written by Ken Friedman (who also wrote several other Kaplan films, such as Bad Girls and Death By Invitation), this was an attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to make an American movie starring Italian actor Terence Hill, who was already well-known to American audiences for They Call Me Trinity.

The plan? Put Hill in a big-budget, globe-trotting action comedy. The result? Total box office poison. Variety reported that Radio City Music Hall actually sued 20th Century-Fox for over $100,000 because ticket sales were so pathetic. When the Rockettes are looking for a refund, you know you’re in trouble.

”When a simple garage mechanic suddenly inherits a billion dollars, he gets more action, excitement, romance, and riotous adventure than money can buy!” Yes, Terence Hill is Guido Falcone, an Italian mechanic who is the only relative not to have begged his rich American uncle for money. When he gets the entire estate, his uncle’s business manager, John Cutler (Jackie Gleason), flies to Italy to try to con him. Despite his sweet nature, Guido is way smarter than he appears and wants to look over the estate; he has to be in San Francisco on a certain date to accept the offer. Cutler, wanting the money for himself, hires Rosie (Valerie Perrine) and her friend Bernie (Dick Miller) to distract Guido and keep him from signing his estate papers.

The movie was originally supposed to feature Lily Tomlin, but the studio gave her the thumb. Enter Valerie Perrine. As the urban legend goes, Perrine introduced herself to the famously modest and sweet-natured Hill by claiming she could light a cigarette with her vagina. Unsurprisingly, the chemistry evaporated instantly. The two supposedly despised each other, making the falling-in-love scenes feel about as romantic as a root canal.

The supporting cast includes R.G. Armstrong as a Southern sheriff, Chill Wills as a military leader, Slim Pickens as a rancher, William Redfield as a company lawyer, Sam Laws and Johnny Ray McGhee as a father and son with differing views on life, and even Leo Rossi as a kidnapper. As I say, it’s the kind of cast I personally would call an all-star, even if no one else would agree.

Hill would also appear in another box-office bomb that year, March or Die, which also starred Gene Hackman and Catherine Deneuve.

I have no idea why Hollywood would hire Hill to play in a movie that’s nothing like what he does best. At least he was able to work with Bud Spencer again and make plenty of late 70s and 80s buddy movies, as well as Super Fuzz as a solo movie three years later.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Der Sittlichkeitsverbrecher is a Swiss social issue film that aims to educate but often feels like a dark, unsettling drama, blending documentary elements with a grim narrative filled with trench coats and grimacing character actors.

Zurich is under siege and we follow the tireless Swiss police and the high-tech (for 1963) wizards at INTERPOL as they hunt down a rogue’s gallery of voyeurs, fetishists and sadists. Once these guys are caught, the movie shifts from a police procedural into a sterile, white-walled nightmare of psychological testing and the ultimate cure: voluntary brain surgery. 

Director Franz Schnyder was usually known for wholesome Swiss village stories, so seeing him dive into the muck of sex crimes is like finding out your favorite kindergarten teacher moonlights as a bouncer at a dive bar.

The film spends a lot of time on rehabilitation. It treats the human brain like suburban dads treat their old cars. If it’s not running right, just get under the hood, play with the timing belt, and see what happens. Except, you know, they’re cutting into human brains.

While the rest of the exploitation filmmakers were busy filming grainy loops of women peeling oranges, Sarno was busy being the Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. He didn’t just want to show skin; he wanted to show the quiet, desperate rot behind the picket fence.

Moonlighting Wives follows Mrs. Joan Rand (Tammy Latour), a woman who realizes that the American Dream is expensive and her husband’s paycheck isn’t cutting it. She goes from being sexually harassed at a stenographer job to organizing a stable of neighborhood wives into a call-girl ring. But this isn’t a girl power heist movie. It’s a Sarno film, which means everyone is miserable. Even when they’re making money, they’re staring into the middle distance, wondering where their souls went.

Based on an actual scandal that took place in Nassau County, NY, in February of 1964, this finds Joan using everyone in her way and paying for it, because when this was made, the bad had to go to jail. Today, she’d be getting away with it and moving on to an even bigger scandal.

Tammy Latour was a staple of Joe Sarno’s early black-and-white “adults only” dramas. This film was thought lost for decades until a print was famously discovered in an eBay film lot and restored. Latour also appears in Sarno’s Flesh and Lace.

The cast also includes Joe Santos, playing one of the detectives. He went on to become a legendary character actor, most famous as Sgt. Dennis Becker on The Rockford Files. He was actually Joe Sarno’s cousin, which is how he ended up in these early “roughies” like this one and The Panic in Needle Park.

As for the belly dancer, that’s Fatima, who was a real-life professional dancer. Sarno often included “floor show” segments in his films to pad the runtime and add “production value” without needing to record synchronized dialogue.

Gretchen Rudolph, who plays Nancy, is also in everything from Fantasm and My Body Hungers to Bed of Violence and Run Swinger Run!

What makes Moonlighting Wives a cut above the usual is that it actually has something to say about the 1960s domestic trap. It’s about the commodification of the Happy Housewife archetype. Joan isn’t a villain; she’s an entrepreneur in a world that gave her no other outlets.

Mitchell reveals a lot of misconceptions.

First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.

Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.

Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.

The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”

He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.

Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.

If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?

Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.

“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…

Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…

The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”

Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.

You can watch this without riffing on Tubi. They also have the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

Dino De Laurentiis gave the world a $25 million remake of King Kong. A year later, Runme Shaw looked at that poster and said, “Hold my tiger bone wine.”

If there is one thing Shaw Brothers knows how to do, it’s take a Western trend, give you some cinematic LSD and feed it through a meat grinder until it comes out as something ten times more insane than the original. 

But don’t let the title—or the alternative name, Goliathon—fool you. This isn’t some dry anthropological study. This is a sweaty, neon-drenched, nihilistic masterpiece of Hong Kong exploitation that asks: What if King Kong were a giant, flammable suit actor living in India and had a crush on a blonde girl in a buckskin bikini?

After an earthquake in the Himalayas (which apparently moved the mountains to the middle of the Indian jungle), a giant ape emerges. Enter Lu Tien, an entertainment mogul who is basically what would happen if Carl Denham were an even bigger scumbag. He wants the ape for a world tour or to turn it into a very large rug. Why do these dudes always want to put these giant monkeys on stage? Anyway, he hires Chen Zhengfeng (Danny Lee, long before he was a John Woo regular), a guy with a broken heart because his girlfriend, a diva named Wang Cuihua, slept with his songwriter brother just to get a hit record. Fame is a fickle mistress.

Chen leads the expedition into the jungle, which is a gauntlet of stock footage, rubber snakes and elephants that look annoyed to be in this movie. Maybe they were warned by monkeys, snakes and alligators about the excesses of Italian film crews. Regardless, just as Chen is about to be monkey meat, he’s saved by Ah-wei (Evelyne Kraft, The French Sex Murders), a wild girl who was raised by the ape, whom she calls Utam, after her parents died in a plane crash. She’s like Jane from Tarzan, but her outfit is held together by hope and cinematic glue.

Naturally, Chen and the wild girl fall in love, because nothing says romance like hiding from an enormous primate. He convinces her to bring Utam back to Hong Kong. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Once they hit the city, the movie shifts to pure kaiju carnage. Lu Tien attempts to assault Ah-wei, triggering Utam’s protective instincts. The ape goes on a rampage through Hong Kong that makes the 1933 Kong look like a disciplined Boy Scout. He’s smashing buses, stomping on extras and eventually climbing the Connaught Centre (the one with all the circular windows that looks like a giant cheese grater; it was the largest building in Hong Kong at the time).

The finale is a pyrotechnic nightmare. While the 1976 Kong died with a whimper on the pavement, Utam goes out in a literal blaze of glory, being blasted by tanks and helicopters while the world burns around him. It’s bleak, it’s loud, and it’s glorious. You will believe that a monstrous monkey can get set on fire.

It’s a Shaw Brothers movie, so the production value is weirdly high while the logic is delightfully low. The special effects were handled by Sadamasa Arikawa, who worked on the original Godzilla films, so you get that authentic man-in-a-suit, miniature-city vibe that warms my cynical heart. It makes me even happier to know the lengths that special effects artist Keizô Murase went to. When the original stuntman refused to be set on fire at the end of the movie, Murase personally doused himself with oil, was set ablaze and jumped off a miniature building three different times, sustaining several injuries from the wood, cement and glass used to make the set. Good news: He was given a gold watch from the film’s producer as payment.

Danny Lee emotes like his life depends on it, Evelyne Kraft spends the entire movie looking like she’s in a shampoo commercial* while holding a baby leopard in a way that says that she’s never seen Roar and the Peking Man himself looks like he’s having a permanent bad hair day (the suit was made from actual human hair, donated by 300 Hong Kong citizens). It’s a movie about the cruelty of civilization, the fickleness of show business and the fact that if you’re a giant ape, you should never, ever fall in love with a white blonde or leave your homeland.

According to Kraft, unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla, this had two endings. In the Indian cut, where it is considered bad luck to fake a death, her character lives. But her character dies at the end of all the other versions of the film. I have seen many Indian movies where someone dies, so this feels like IMDbs.

Only in Hong Kong would the heroine die a bloody death at the end of a film.

Beyond Quentin Tarantino, who re-released this movie in 1999, Roger Ebert was also a fan, saying, “Mighty Peking Man is very funny, although a shade off the high mark of Infra-Man, which was made a year earlier, and is my favorite Hong Kong monster film. Both were produced by the legendary Runme Shaw, who, having tasted greatness, obviously hoped to repeat. I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. I am awarding Mighty Peking Man three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius, but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than Infra-Man. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

*Speaking of IMDbs, I learned from that site that The Peking Man wasn’t the only thing turning heads in India. Kraft’s fur bikini proved so distracting that male extras were repeatedly slapped by their wives mid-scene. This battle of the gazes forced the frustrated crew to reshoot the sequence until the cast finally focused on the monster instead of the star.

Kraft claimed that her fur bikini in the film was so skimpy that her top kept popping off while filming, especially during the action scenes. Everything would then stop while she fixed the wardrobe malfunction, but after it kept happening, she just ignored all the male actors and the film crew staring at her breasts. She suspected, but could not prove, that Shaw Brothers had the wardrobe department deliberately make her top that way so that everyone could see her topless and possibly even have footage of it to use in the film.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message.

BONUS: Listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here: