Directed by Bob Balaban (yes, the guy from Christopher Guest comedies) and written by Christopher Hawthorne. Parents finds the Laemle family — Nick (Randy Quaid), Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Michael (Bryan Madorsky) moving into the California suburbs. Between seeing his parents making love and watching his father do an autopsy, Michael is a bit screwed up. His dreams are horrible and he believes his parents are cannibals. But what if he’s right?

But what can you do when your parents want to feed you the meat of your guidance counselor, Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis)?

The film’s most unsettling quality is its visual obsession with food. Director Bob Balaban utilized macro photography and heightened sound design to make the sound of a knife hitting a plate or the sight of a pot roast look like a crime scene. To make the mystery meat look particularly unappetizing and gelatinous, the production used a mix of brisket, food coloring and heavy amounts of glaze.

Siskel and Ebert disagreed on this; a big surprise was that Gene loved it and Roger didn’t. However, Ken Russell compared it to Blue Velvet and claimed that it was better than Lynch’s movie.

While Randy Quaid has certainly moved into legitimately weird territory in real life over the last decade, his performance in Parents is often cited by critics as a masterclass in repressed 1950s aggression. He isn’t playing crazy. He’s playing a man who is desperately trying to appear normal, which is much scarier.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re eager for you to shock us, titillate us, and perhaps even thrill us a bit. Oh, and you’ve brought Carroll Baker with you! Please, show us the tale you’ve crafted!

Released in Italy as Orgasmo, it was one of the first X-rated movies in the U.S., and the ads definitely played it up, especially because it featured Baker. She had left America as a single mother with two children, and her prospects in Hollywood weren’t great. In Italy, despite making movies that she said “What they think is wonderful is not what we might,” she found a career. Later, she would admit that it showed her an entirely different world and brought her back to feeling alive again.

What’s confusing is that Lenzi’s next movie was released as Paranoia in Italy and A Quiet Place to Kill in America.

I love this interview that she did with Tank Magazine, answering if she ever did any avant-garde projects: “Some of the films in Europe, of course, but a lot of them I haven’t even seen. The one I’m curious about is called Baba Yaga; it was a really far-out, wild, cartoonish sort of thing. I play the title character, a 1,500-year-old witch, and all my sisters were witches, too. I didn’t have to be completely naked, but in every Italian film, there was a scene where you had to show your breasts. Usually, I was talking on the telephone or reading a book. One day, they announced a nude scene – I couldn’t believe it. But the make-up artist and hairdresser were already there, dying the other girls’ pubic hair to match the hair on their heads.”

Baker plays Kathryn West, a glamorous American widow who retreats to a palatial Italian villa just weeks after her wealthy husband’s passing. She is the picture of fragile elegance, drowning in luxury and boredom until a handsome drifter named Peter (Lou Castel) breaks down at her gates.

The villa’s isolation quickly turns from a sanctuary into a playground for predators. Peter moves in, followed shortly by his sister, Eva (Colette Descombes). The dynamic is electric and immediately suspicious. As the siblings weave a web of sexual manipulation, the truth emerges: they aren’t related, and Kathryn isn’t their host—she’s their mark.

The film descends into a harrowing depiction of gaslighting, which is a term that gets used a lot these days. Trust me. This movie has real gaslighting. Peter and Eva keep Kathryn in a drug-induced stupor, fueling her with pills and booze while playing a haunting, discordant song on a loop to shatter her psyche. It is a proto-slasher psychological thriller where the weapon isn’t a knife, but the systematic erosion of a woman’s reality. But don’t worry. In the world of Lenzi, every sin eventually demands a receipt.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe, where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a mature actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you appreciate melodramatic twists, layered narratives, and visually striking sex scenes, then it’s time to indulge in this film.

If you think you’ve seen it all because you sat through The Devils or owned a bootleg of Killer Nun, Bruno Mattei is here to grab your rosary beads and yank you straight into the abyss. The Other Hell (originally L’altro inferno) isn’t just a movie; it’s a 90-minute assault on every Sunday School lesson you ever endured.

Get ready for a movie overflowing with blasphemy, shot at the Convento di Santa Priscilla in Rome (once owned by FIAT but now by the Secret Service). Then again, the print that Severin used for the Blu-ray was found behind a false wall in a Bologna nunnery! I sum up this movie with these three words: Not fucking around.

Written by Claudio Fragasso (Rats: The Night of Terror) and directed by Bruno Mattei (Seven Magnificent Gladiators, Robowar), this is a pull-no-punches nunsploitation shockfest. You think mother! was bad?  Then you are by no means ready for this one. A baby gets boiled alive, and that’s the very least of the shocks in store. And if you’re Catholic, well, get ready to go to confession.

Boasting a Goblin score stolen from Beyond the Darkness (actually from their albums Roller and Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark; Fragasso said they had the band in the movie “as they were fashionable and asked them to write music for the film, but they asked for a lot of money, leading to the production to use stock music with a few modifications.” Mattei claimed that he was friends with their publisher, Carlo Bixio, who gave him the music he wanted.

The plot kicks off with Sister Cristina getting lost in the catacombs — never a good move in an Italian movie — where she finds Sister Assunta (Paola Montenero, Sylvie from A Bay of Blood) in a morgue laboratory. Assunta is busy embalming corpses and casually dropping lore about nuns fornicating with Satan and the mysterious murder of the previous Mother Superior, Sister Florence. Before you can say “Hail Mary,” Assunta goes into a supernatural trance, murders Cristina and then drops dead herself.

Mother Vincenza (Franca Stoppi, who was also in Beyond the Darkness) tries to play it off as an accident to Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli), but the gig is up when Sister Rosaria (Susanna Forgione) starts spraying blood from her mouth during communion and develops a case of terminal stigmata.

Enter Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo, who survived City of the Living Dead only to end up here). He’s a scientific priest sent to investigate, but he spends most of his time clashing with Vincenza, who runs the convent like a fascist boot camp.

It turns out the convent’s basement isn’t just for storing communion wine. It’s housing Elisa (Francesca Carmeno), Vincenza’s illegitimate, horribly disfigured daughter, who was tossed into boiling water at birth by the former Mother Superior. Elisa didn’t die, though; she just developed Carrie-esque telekinetic powers, like making people strangle themselves with their own rosaries.

By the time we get to the finale, Vincenza has dropped the act, admitted she made a pact with the Devil and claimed Elisa is the literal daughter of Satan. It all ends in the morgue with resurrected corpses, psychic battles, and Father Valerio losing his mind. The final kicker? The Bishop shows up to investigate the earthquake and gets a face full of rotting nun corpse falling out of a coffin.

Oh yeah — between priests being set on fire and a nun’s severed head in the sacristy, this movie is every nightmare you had in CCD class. When Mother Vincenza yells, “The genitals are the door to evil! The vagina, the uterus, the womb; the labyrinth that leads to hell; the devil’s tools!” you’ll either cheer or recoil in terror, depending on whether or not you ever sat through a five-hour Good Friday mass.

Seriously. This movie tested even my resolve of how far is too far. Which is just another way to tell you that I loved it.

This was shot at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza with most of the same cast and crew. Fragasso says that he shot The Other Hell downstairs and Mattei shot the other upstairs, helping each other as needed. As for Mattei, he would always say that Fragrasso was just an assistant director. They did the same two movies for the price of one on Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence In a Women’s Prison, as well as Scalps and White Apache.

Mattei was interviewed by European Trash Cinema and said, “Let’s say that he has influenced almost everyone. For example, L’altro Inferno/The Other Hell utilized Argento’s concepts, but wasn’t an absolute copy of Inferno, the title was dictated by the distributor. He makes movies wilh lots of blood, I’m not adverse to it but in some countries, like Germany, gory movies aren’t distributed.”

While it premiered in Italy in 1981, it didn’t reach American theaters until 1984, where it was renamed Guardian of Hell. It was unleashed on VHS by Vestron Video, finding its true home in the wood-paneled basements of horror nerds who wanted something a little more European.

I can’t believe that you could have walked into a multiplex and watched this.

Interpol agent Ramon Ortega (Franco Guerrero) and his new blonde American children’s book author wife Ann (Jody Kay, Death Screams) are back in the Philippines after a honeymoon in San Francisco. Within minutes, the drug dealer that our hero is after — Edwards (Christopher Mitchum) — has sent his men to kill Ann and has had his arm chopped off. And in case you’re wondering if the drug dealer is evil, he has an evil Axis symbol on the side of his boat.

Edwards doesn’t just want Ortega dead; he wants him broken. After the brutal hit on the beach that leaves Ann dead and Ortega’s arm severed by a machete, Edwards leaves him alive as a living warning. Ortega spirals into depression and drinking, just trying to live out the rest of his life in pain, when a new master named Wo Chen appears and teaches him how to fight with one hand and how to do gun fu, if you will, in which they have a gigantic training device with numbers. The master calls out the targets, and Ortega improves with each shot.

You feel for Ortega, as he found the right kind of woman, the one who sleeps with baby dolls and has sex in the shower with her shower cap on, the height of eroticism. But seriously, he really does hit rock bottom, but this film pulls him up and gives him the chance to get revenge.

Ortega eventually fits his stump with a specialized prosthetic that allows him to steady his aim, effectively turning his entire body into a tripod for his .45 caliber vengeance. The showdown moves from the slums of Manila to Edwards’ fortified compound. Ortega has to dismantle a small army of mercenaries using a combination of one-handed reloading techniques and raw, unadulterated 80s rage.

This movie is an absolute blast from start to finish, delivering the kind of weirdness and magical action that could only come from the Philippines and a master director like Bobby A. Suarez, who also directed American Commandos, The Bionic Boy, Cleopatra Wong and Warriors of the Apocalypse.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The actual release date for this movie is under some debate: director Robert Altman — yes, the same one who did Nashville — shot the film in 1983; it was copyrighted in 1985, then shelved until it got a small theatrical release in 1987 and 1988.

The reason for the 1983–1988 delay was simple: MGM had no idea what it was. They expected a raunchy, commercial hit like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Instead, they got a weird, satirical, jazz-infused art film about teens. They test-marketed it, audiences were baffled and the studio orphaned it until a change in management led to the tiny 1987 theatrical run.

While it might seem weird that the man who gave us M*A*S*H* tackled National Lampoon, Altman was actually in a career exile at the time. After the failure of Popeye, he worked on smaller budgets and experimental formats. Now, we could debate whether he was the right person to shoot it, but I kind of like this movie, which has a ramshackle, all-over-the-place feel.

Loosely based on stories written by Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. O.C. and Stiggs were recurring characters in the magazine, with the entire October 1982 issue being about “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” One of the big differences is that the print versions of the characters are destructive, while their film versions are a little more socially redeemable.

O.C., which means Oliver Cromwell Oglivie (Daniel H. Jenkins), and Stiggs (Neill Barry) are two Arizona teens whose idea of a great night is driving their car, the Gila Monster, to pick up girls, get booze from Wino Bob (Melvin van Peebles) and pick up some ladies. And oh yeah, drive the Schwab family — Randall (Paul Dooley), Elinore (Jane Curtin), Randall Jr. (Jon Cryer) and Lenore (Laura Urstein) — nuts.

Even in a teen comedy, Altman used his signature multi-track recording system. If the movie feels “all over the place,” it’s because characters are often talking over each other in a way that Animal House never attempted. To capture the feel down right, Altman encouraged the young actors to live in the house that served as the O.C. and Stiggs home during production to create authentic clutter and chemistry.

Altman’s argument is that, while audiences saw his take on Porky’s, he saw through the fake outrage in those movies and was delivering satire. But yeah. No one else wanted that. As the director himself said, “It was a satire of teen sex comedies, gosh darn it, not an example of that dubious breed!”

The film features King Sunny Adé and his African Beats. Altman was obsessed with Juju music at the time and shoehorned a massive musical performance into the film, which was wildly out of place for a 1980s teen flick, but adds to that mind-roasting vibe.

But hey! Ray Walston is great as always as Gramps, and it’s kinda inspiring to get Dennis Hopper in one of these movies. He even flies his helicopter so Mark can woo Cynthia Nixon.

It’s kind of fascinating to me that this movie was even made, and that’s pretty much the charm of it. It’s a $7 million middle finger to the studio system. It’s not funny because of the jokes. It’s funny because it feels like it was directed by someone who had never met a teenager but had read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson.

Dick Butler (Ray Lovelock, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) and Ingrid Sjorman (Ornella Muti, Flash Gordon) are trying to enjoy their own summer of love, traveling through Italy and paying for it with porn magazines and nudes of Ingrid. They get put through a relentless wringer. First, the police bust their smut-peddling operation; then, a biker gang strips them of what little dignity they had left. By the time they reach the gates of a sprawling, modernist villa, they aren’t looking for enlightenment. They’re looking for a place to hide.

Also known as An Ideal Place to Kill, Deadly Trap, Dirty Pictures and Love Stress in Japan, this Umberto Lenzi giallo is all about what happens next.

Our hapless couple has found their way to the home of bored middle-class housewife Barbara Slater (Irene Papas, Don’t Torture a Duckling). She’s up for some sexual shenigans, potentially with both of them, but she’s also way smarter than either of our teenagers realizes.

Dick and Ingrid aren’t just hippies; they are the poster children for 1971’s fading counterculture. Beautiful, entitled and spectacularly dim-witted, their “Summer of Love” is less about spiritual awakening and more about a sleazy, high-speed hustle across the Italian countryside.

In the book Blood and Black Lace: The Definitive Guide to Italian Sex and Horror Movies, Lenzi claimed that he had trouble getting Papas to participate in the threesome scene. What he had no trouble with was getting Lovelock’s help in capturing the free spirit of 1971, as he sings the theme “How Can You Live Your Life?” and rocks out some amazing clothes, including the Union Jack jacket that appears on the poster for the Oasis of Fear release of this movie.

This movie was shot in the same home as Fulci’s Perversion Story and Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. I have no idea where they got the matching white bell-bottom outfits or the yellow old-school car they covered in flower stickers.

While not a top-tier giallo, this is still a quick watch packed with plenty of twists. Don’t get it confused with another Lenzi movie, A Quiet Place to Kill.

This is one of the many movies in which Independent-International used comic book artist Gray Morrow to do the art for the posters. He also did the poster and sales art for Brain of Blood, Cinderella 2000, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Nurse Sherri, Five Bloody Graves, Blazing Stewardesses and Dynamite Brothers.

This film, produced by Sam Sherman and remixed by Al Adamson, was once Captain Roughneck from St. Pauli, directed and written by Rolf Olsen. In that movie, Captain Jolly (Curd Jürgens) and his men have been hired to smuggle a vaccine within a shipment of booze. When government officials try to take that booze from him, he destroys it, and the vaccine gets stolen, which gets him blamed for taking it. There are also some nurses — they had to come in somewhere — kidnapped in the jungle.

It’s a little over an hour long, and the new material from Adamson has some of the nurses making out. One of them is Swedish model Lenka Novak, who also appeared in Moonshine County Express, Coach, The Great American Girl Robbery and Vampire Hookers and was one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

The movie often feels like two different films fighting for screen time: a gritty German smuggling drama and a 1970s American sexploitation romp. That’s because that’s exactly what’s happening on screen. And it’s a bit of a shock to see Jürgens in an Al Adamson-edited mess. Jürgens was a genuine international star, famous for playing the villain Karl Stromberg in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

“It was hardly the crime of the century…It wasn’t even the mugging of the month. It was just a rollicking rip-off!”

Professor (Robert Nichols, The Thing) is a man with a tweed jacket, a permanent squint and a foolproof plan that involves more geometry than common sense. His crew is a motley collection of losers and their target is Big Bertha’s, a sprawling, neon-lit roadhouse tucked away in the backwoods. To the Professor, it’s a vault of untaxed cash and liquid gold. To the rest of the county, it’s the only place to get a decent drink and a game of cards without being judged by the preacher.

Big Bertha (Hetty Galen, The Manitou) doesn’t need a security system. She has a six-gauge shotgun named Persuasion and a staff of girls who can outshoot, outdrink and outwrestle any man in three counties.

The Professor’s stealthy approach is doomed from the start. They arrive just as the local Sheriff’s Department is celebrating a birthday. The parking lot is a sea of squad cars, yet the Professor mistakes the flashing lights for grand opening decorations. Once the moonshine is discovered and the bullets start flying (mostly hitting vases and bottles), the movie devolves into pure physical comedy. It doesn’t take itself seriously. The film thrives on the absurdity of professional”criminals being outmatched by a house full of girls in nightgowns and a rowdy sheriff’s department. Somewhere in all of this is Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead.

This was directed by Peter Kares, the only film he’d helm, but he also produced Longshot and The Switch or How to Alter Your Ego. There were plenty of writers, including Robert N. Langworthy, who produced Preacherman and scored Sex and the College Girl, who came up with the concept; Robert Vervoordt and Albert T. Viola (Amos Huxley himself, the star of Preacherman) worked out the story and Viola and Harvey Flaxman (the writer of Grizzly!) wrote the script.

Nerd facts: An orphan in this is played by Paige Conner, who would go on to be Katy, the space devil child in The Visitor! There’s also Josie Johnson from Stigma (she’s also in Fingers, which has a dream cast of Harvey Keitel, Tisa Farrow, Jim Brown, Tanya Roberts and Danny Aiello) and George Ellis shows up. He was horror host Bestoink Dooley, who was in his own movie, The Legend of Blood Mountain. Mary Mendum is here as well. She used the name Rebecca Brooke for several of Joe Sarno’s films, such as Misty and Abigail Lesley Is Back in Town. Speaking of those movies, Bil Godsey was the cinematographer on them both, as well as this film. He also shot camera on Sisters and Deep Throat Part II.

The ninth movie in the saga of Count Waldemar Daninsky — as always played by Paul Naschy —  wasn’t released in the United States until 1985, when it was retitled from its original title, El Retorno del Hombre Lobo (The Return of the Wolfman). The last Naschy movie to play the U.S. theatrically as The Craving, it’s also been released here on DVD and Blu-ray as Night of the Werewolf.

Naschy has gone on record saying this was his favorite Hombre Lobo film and that it was a remake of his 1970 effort, La Noche de Walpurgis (Walpurgis Night).

The film opens with a brutal, atmospheric prologue set in the 16th century. Waldemar Daninsky is sentenced to death alongside a coven of witches led by the “Blood Countess” herself, Elizabeth Bathory (Julia Saly). Because Daninsky’s curse makes him virtually unkillable, the executioners resort to a multi-layered failsafe. It starts with a silver cross dagger pushed into his heart, an iron mask bolted to his skull and a subterranean tomb where his grave is hidden from anyone who wants to bring him back to life.

Fast forward to the modern era, where three female scholars arrive at the ruins of the Daninsky estate. When tomb robbers—ignoring every red flag in history—pull the silver dagger from Waldemar’s chest, they don’t just resurrect a man; they unleash the Wolfman just as Bathory’s disciples succeed in resurrecting their mistress. One of the women that Daninsky meets in our time — Karin (Azucena Hernández) — will become his great love, but if you’ve watched any Spanish werewolf movies, love is often doomed to mutual death and funeral flames.

This higher-budgeted effort — produced by Naschy’s own Dalmata Films — failed to score in foreign markets and spelled doom for the studio. That’s a true shame, as it’s probably the best-looking version of Naschy’s werewolf vision.

Emilio Paolo Miraglia created two gialli — this film and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. This one goes deeper into the horror realm than the genre’s typical themes. For example, instead of a modern city or a fashion house, we get a crumbling, mist-shrouded estate filled with secret passages and family curses.

Lord Alan Cunningham starts this movie off by running away from an insane asylum, a place he’s been since the death of his redheaded wife, Evelyn, whom he caught having sex with another man. To deal with his grief, Alan does what any of us would do — pick up redhead prostitutes and strippers, tie them up, then kill them.

A seance freaks Alan out so badly he passes out, so his cousin — and only living heir — Farley moves in to take care of him, which basically means going to strip clubs and playing with foxes. Alan nearly kills another stripper before Farley gives him some advice — to get over Evelyn, he should marry someone who looks just like her. Alan selects Gladys (Marina Malfatti, All the Colors of the Dark) as his new wife and comes back home.

Sure, you meet someone one night and marry them the next. But nothing could compare to the weirdness of living in an ancient mansion with a staff of identical waitresses, Evelyn’s brother, and Alan’s wheelchair-bound aunt. Our heroine is convinced that Evelyn is not dead. And the other family members get killed off — Albert with a snake, and Agatha is eaten by foxes!

Gladys even looks at the body in the tomb before Alan catches her and slaps the shit out of her, as he is going crazier and crazier. Finally, Evelyn rises from her grave, which sends him back to a mental institution.

The big reveal? Gladys and Farley were in on it all along. But wait, there’s more! Susan, the stripper who survived Alan’s attack, was the one who was really Evely, and Gladyshads had been poisoned! Before she dies, the lady who we thought was our heroine wipes out the stripper, and Farley gets away with the perfect crime.

But wait! There’s more! Alan had faked his breakdown and did it all so that he could learn that it was Farley who was making love to his wife and killed her when she refused to run away with him. A fight breaks out, and Farley gets burned by acid. He’s arrested, and Alan — who up until now was pretty much the villain of this movie — gets away with all of his crimes!

This is a decent thriller, but it really feels padded in parts and tends to crawl. That said, it has some great music, incredibly decorated sets and some twists. Not my favorite giallo, but well worth a Saturday afternoon watch. There are moments of sheer beauty here, such as the rainstorm in which Alan sees Evelyn’s ghost rise.

The ending remains one of the most cynical in the genre. Usually, the killer is caught, and justice is served; here, Alan—a man who spent the first forty minutes of the movie torturing and murdering innocent women—is essentially framed as the hero because he outsmarted his even greedier cousin. It’s a dark, twisted piece of Euro-cult cinema that prioritizes style and shock over moral resolution.