Supposedly, The Devil’s Wedding Night (AKA Full Moon of the Virgins) was all Mark Damon’s idea. After being in House of Usher, Damon had moved to Italy and appeared in movies like Black Sabbath and Johnny Yuma.

Perhaps this idea was the start of his producing career, which was more successful than his acting job. Damon was planning on selling the movie an American production company. Luigi Batzella (Nude for Satan, The Beast In Heat) was picked to direct, but most people believe that Joe D’Amato stepped in and finished the film.

I’m a firm believer in this theory because there’s a moment near the end of this movie where an otherworldly Countess Dolingen De Vries rises from a bathtub of blood and fog and writhes near nude on the screen and somehow going beyond the confines of the screen to destroy my mind. I generally try my best not to turn reviews of movies with atrractive women into male gaze spectacles, but Rosalba Neri is absoutely iconic in this moment, a perfect scene that is never discussed nearly enough.

There’s also a magic vampire ring of the Nibelungen, which is gigantic costume jewelery and therefore better than any Hollywood baubles, village girls with sacred amulets of Pazuzu (yes, really), five virgins getting sacrificed all at once in an express line of bloodletting magic, three different twist endings in a row, tripped out Dr. Who looking tunnel moments, D’Amato billing himself as Michael Holloway and going absolutely wlld capturing every inch of womanly curves and an incredible setting, the Castello Piccolomini Balsorano, the same place Lady Frankenstein, Bloody Pit of Horror, Crypt of the Vampire, The Lickerish Quartet, The Blade Master, Sister Emanuelle, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, The Reincarnation of Isabel, Farfallon, Pensiero d’amore, Lady Barbara, 7 Golden Women Against Two 07: Treasure Hunt, C’è un fantasma nel mio letto, Baby Love and Put Your Devil Into My Hell were all shot at.

Plus, Xiro Papas, the monster of Frankenstein 80, plays a vampiric giant.

If you’re a fan of the harder side of Hammer, then allow this female vampire to obsess you as well.

Has there ever been a better movie than Destroy All Monsters? It is everything magical about film: giant monsters smashing cities and fighting one another while people run and scream in terror. It is cinematic junk food, a treat for the mind that transports me back to watching Action Movies on Youngstown’s WKBN 27 as a little kid, jumping around the room in pure glee.

Every giant monster on Earth has been captured and sent to Monster Island, where they are kept secure and studied — until all communication is mysteriously cut off.

Turns out that the scientists on the island are being mind-controlled by the Kilaaks, who demand the human race surrender or face total destruction. They control the monsters to attack famous cities all over the world: Godzilla decimates New York City, Rodan smashes Moscow, Mothra takes out Beijing, Gorosaurus crushes Paris and Manda, a giant Japanese dragon, goes shithouse on London. All of these attacks are to keep the UNSC forces from finding out that Tokyo is the real target.

Luckily, the humans are able to take out the control signals and the good guy monsters take on King Ghidorah, who is overcome and killed (Minilla, Varan, Anguirus and Kumonga show up, too). The Kilaaks also have a Fire Dragon, a monster that starts setting cities on fire. Godzilla takes out its base, and the forces of good triumph.

This was intended to be the final Godzilla film, as the series’ popularity was waning. However, the success of Destroy All Monsters led to even more Godzilla films.

When I was a kid, I was impatient for the human scenes to end and for the monsters to show up. I’ve never changed. All I want to do is watch giant monsters destroy cities and fight one another. This movie delivers all of that and more. It’s not high art, but does it have to be?

Let’s just assume that the events of Demons actually happened, as this movie does. Released just seven months after the original, this movie opens with the residents of a high-rise apartment building watching a movie dramatization of the events that took place in that film. They watch as several teenagers trespass into the closed-off city that was destroyed after the demonic outbreak. Finding the dead body of a demon, one of the teens accidentally drips blood in its mouth and the whole thing starts all over again.

Sally Day (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Mother of Tears, Opera) is upset that her boyfriend hasn’t come to her sweet sixteen party — or, as they say in Italy, “dolce sedici anni” — and she decides to watch the movie. So, you know, as these things happen, a demon crawls out of her television set and infects her. She kills nearly everyone at her party and turns them into more demons, who begin to infect the entire apartment building. Little kids, dogs, cops, bodybuilders, pregnant women — no one is safe from these demons.

George and Hannah (David Edwin Knight and Nancy Brilli, who was also in Body Count) spend most of the movie trying to escape Sally so that they can have their child. She’s nearly unstoppable, plus she has a flying demon on her side.

Italian movie fans should keep their eyes open for Asia Argento, who debuted in this film as Ingrid. Plus, Bobby Rhodes (from the original, as well as Hercules and War Bus Commando), Virginia Bryant (who is also in the unrelated sequel Demons 3: The Ogre), Lino Salemme (Ripper from the first film), Davide Marotta (who played a child alien in a very famous series of Italian Kodak commercials and was also the monstrous boy in Phenomena) and Michele Mirabella (Dancing Crow from Thunder).

Initially, Hannah’s baby would become a demon inside her and claw its way out of her stomach. This scene was taken out when Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento decided they wanted a happier ending. Which is nice, I guess.

After all, this movie is more about jump scares and less about freaking you out with the sheer amount of gore that it features. Is it any wonder that it has less of a metal soundtrack and instead features new wave bands like The Smiths, The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim, Dead Can Dance, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel and The Producers?

Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he loved love!

Tony Cannelloni (Louie Bonanno) just wants to get out of his mom’s (Marie Sawyer) house and get laid. If you were watching this on USA Up All Night, you get it. He gets a book, Sex Appeal, and tries to become a sexual dynamo. He doesn’t, but his landlord (Jeffrey Hurst) writes about him as the New Jersey Casanova, which becomes some kind of fame (and the source of a heart attack for his mother).

Tony is in love with Corrine (Tally Chanel), but the thing viewers will probably enjoy — well, me — is that this is packed with mid 80s adult stars, like Gloria Leonard as a newscaster, Veronica Hart as a woman so sensitive that her fingers are erogenous zones, Merle Michaels as a nerdy girl who ticks all my boxes and ends up flipped into a Murphy bed and Taija Rae and Samantha Fox as two tough girls who truss up Tony and have their way with him. And Candida Royalle as a sex worker!

I get that this is a dumb sex comedy with no budget, but it caught me on an afternoon where I had doom scrolled the end of the world and was in sheer panic mode. I was feeling like no one wanted to listen to me or help me feel better and here’s Chuck Vincent, forty years in the past, giving me the hug that I needed.

As for the lead actor in this, “In February of 1992, following a string of miraculous events, and in answer to his prayers for Divine guidance, Louix had an encounter with four Ascended Masters. Soon thereafter, he renounced the material world and began training in earnest with the Masters in The Ancient Mystery School, fulfilling one of the prophecies spoken to him by Jesus at the age of five.” Thanks to theironcupcake on Letterboxd for this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

“Let The Exorcist beware, The Demons are here!”

One can only imagine that Jess Franco sat in a theater as Ken Russell’s The Devils ended and thought to himself, “But where’s the sex? I want more of it. I demand more of it!

After watching a witch burn, we meet two nuns in a convent, the virginal Margaret (Britt Nichols AKA Carmen Yazalde, who appears in The Erotic Rights of Frankenstein, A Virgin Among the Living Dead and is sacrificed in Tombs of the Blind Dead) and her more sex-obsessed sister Kathleen (Anne Libert, House of 1000 Pleasures and Sins of the Flesh).

A rich woman named Lady De Winter (Karin Field, Target Frankie and Return of Shanghai Joe) believes that Kathleen is possessed by Satan and that the two are the daughters of that blackened witch, so she puts her top man, Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dalbés, A Quiet Place to Kill and Espionage In Tangiers) after her. Of course, he falls in love and lets her escape. And even when Inquisitor Lord Justice Jeffreys (Cihangir Gaffari, Dick Turpin and Bloodsport) gives him another chance, Renfield runs back to her and the two are soon tortured into near oblivion.

Meanwhile, Satan himself appears in the convent and assaults Margaret, replacing her innocence with an overwhelming desire to punish anyone who harmed her mother or sister, starting with Lady De Winter, often by kissing them into skeletons. You know, no one loves female revenge more than Jess Franco and he’s going all out here, with Margaret seducing her Mother Superior right into suicide and then leaving no man or woman safe from her vengeance.

This is one of the more gorgeous films Franco would make — it was shot by Raul Artigot (The Ghost Galleon, The Cannibal Man, The Pyjama Girl Case) — and he makes excellent use of his budget. And he lives up to those dreams of a movie that somehow answers, “What if Witchfinder General was more about lesbians?”

They will make cemeteries their cathedrals, and the cities will be your tombs. With that line, you know that what you’re about to watch better be the most mind-blowing horror film possible. Good news — Demons is all of that and then some, the kind of movie that has everything that I watch movies for.

I can’t be silent or still while it runs, growing more excited by every moment. It is the perfect synthesis of 1980s gore and heavy metal, presented with no characterization or character growth whatsoever. It’s also the most awesome movie you will ever watch.

This is an all-star film, if you consider Italian ’80s horror creators to be all-stars. Lamberto Bava is directing and doing special effects, Dario Argento producing, a script written by Bava, Argento, Franco Ferrini (Once Upon a Time in America, Phenomena) and Dardano Sacchetti (every single Italian horror film that was ever awesome…a short list includes A Bay of Blood, Shock, The Beyond, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Blastfighter, Hands of Steel and so many more), and assistant directing and acting from Michele Soavi.

The movie begins on the Berlin subway, where Cheryl is pursued by a silver-masked man (Soavi) who hands her tickets to see a film at the Metropol. She brings along her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo from A Cat in the Brain and Demonia), and they soon meet two boys, George (Urbano Barberini, Gor, Opera) and Ken.

The masked man has brought all manner of folks to the theater: a blind man and his daughter, as well as some interesting couples, including a boyfriend and girlfriend, an older married couple, and Tony the pimp and his girls, one of whom is Shocking Dark‘s Geretta Geretta. As they wait for the movie to begin, a steel mask in the lobby scratches her.

The movie that unspools — a slasher about teenagers who disturb the final resting place of Nostradamus — also has that very same steel mask. When it touches anyone in the movie, they turn murderous. At the very same time, one of the prostitutes scratches herself in the bathroom, and her face erupts into pus and reveals a demon. From here on out, the movie becomes one long action sequence, as the other prostitute transforms into a demon in front of the entire audience.

Meanwhile, four punks do cocaine in a Coke can and break in, releasing a demon into the city as the rest of the movie audience attempts to escape and are killed one by one. Only George and Cheryl survive, as our hero uses a sword and motorcycle to attack the demons before a helicopter crashes through the roof. But then the masked man attacks them!

I’m not going to ruin the rest of the movie, but it will tell you that even the credits offer no safety in the world of Demons. And oh yeah — Giovanni Frezza (Bob from House by the Cemetery) shows up!

Look for Argento’s daughter, Fiore, as Angela. Ingrid, the usherette, is played by Nicoletta Elmi, who was the baron’s daughter in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, as well as appearing in Baron Blood, A Bay of Blood, and Who Saw Her Die?

Demons are ridiculous. Pure goop and gore mixed with power chords, samurai swords, punk rockers and even a Billy Idol song, which had to blow the budget. It also looks gorgeous — filled with practical effects, gorgeous film stock and amazing colors, no doubt the influence of Bava’s father. The scene where the yellow-eyed demons emerge from the blue blackness is everything horror movies should be.

This doesn’t just have my highest recommendation. It earns my scorn if you haven’t seen it yet!

Want to know way too much about this movie and everything connected to it?

Check out this article and the video I created: So what’s up with all the Demons sequels?

Homosexual fashion designer Bruce Wilson (Stephen Strucker, Johnny the air traffic controller from Airplane!), sexed up Dick Peters (Bob Minor) and Carl C. Clooney (Michael Pataki) escape the insane asylum and work their way into a girls’ school. Still, instead of this being a revengeomatic, it’s a comedy.

The Delinquent School Girls cut of this film missed the first half hour and all of George “Buck” Flower’s scenes that were in the Carnal Madness version. It was also released in the UK as Scrubbers 2 to cash in on the girl school movie Scrubbers and as Sizzlers as part of a double feature with Intimate Games.

Directed by Greg Corarito (who directed The Sadistic Hypnotist and Hard On the Trail, the adult film that sent Lash LaRue on a journey of redemption), who wrote the movie with John Lamb (Mondo Keyhole, Zodiac Killer), Maurie Smith (who wrote Recruits and Julie Darling), it starts with the men visiting the farm of Earl (George “Buck” Flower) and his wife Ellie (Julie Gant), who ends up in bed with Dick, a former baseball play r. Then, it’s off to the school where the girls end up kicking their asses more often than not, and Pataki gets to show his skill at impressions.

As for the girls, there’s Colleen Brennan (AKA Sharon Kelly, Olga Vault; she’s also in Supervixens and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS), magazine starlet Roberta Pedon and several attractive actresses who made this their only movie.  Brennan said of this movie, “I always wondered how anybody managed to pull a movie out of that reeking pile of short ends.”

You can watch this on Midnight Pulp.

Uranus Studio is scammed Uncle Sam into financing Deep Jaws, a sexploitation mermaid movie that has nothing to do with Deep Throat or Jaws. How did they get the money? The government paid them to fake the moon landing. Yes, really. Also: This is softcore. This isn’t Gums, which is very similar but hardcore.

Directed by Perry Dell (The Dicktator) and written by Walt David (Evil Come Evil Go), Charles Teitel and Manuel Conde (the cinematographer of Terror at Orgy Castle), this has a good cast: Sandy Carey (who was in Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Drive In Massacre, The Beast and the Vixens and Time Walker), redhead dreamgirl Roxanne Brewer (Fantasm, Sexual Kung Fu In Hong Kong), Anne Gaybis (Snow White in Fairy Tales) and George “Buck” Flower.

It’s not great but hey — softcore was on the way out so at least it’s different.

You can watch this on CultPics.

Let me put it out there right now: This movie is completely insane.

Let me see if I can summarize it.

A high-tech chicken farm is attempting to breed birds with no heads or bones. A love triangle develops between the three people who run it: Anna (international sex symbol and the photojournalist who was one of the first to interview Fidel Castro, Gina Lollobrigida), her prostitute killing husband Marco and their secretary Gabriella (Ewa Aulin, the near goddess who appeared in films like Candy and Death Smiles on a Murderer).

Yes. Headless and boneless chickens, all inside a fashionable proto giallo filled with sex and murder. You better believe I’m all over this movie.

Director Giulio Questi was also behind Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! and Arcana. I’ve seen this movie explained as a “socio-politically sophisticated avant-garde giallo,” which is pretty much the best way I can think of telling you what it’s all about. It’s also around 40 years ahead of its time, yet blissfully stuck in 1968.

Despite being Anna’s cousin, Gabri hooks up with her husband, and they debate running away together. However, Gabri is already married to Mondain, and their plan is to kill Anna and frame  Marco. There’s also the issue of Anna wanting to have something special and strange with Marco, which, instead of being a child, ends up being these Eraserhead-ish chicken balls that scream and bleed worms when he kills them.

When Marco discovers his wife’s body in a hotel room, he cleans the scene up and brings her body to the farm to turn it into chicken feed. That’s when we learn his big secret: he doesn’t really kill prostitutes, but instead role plays the murder and sends them away with plenty of cash. But then, as he tries to feed his wife into the machine, he falls in just as the police arrive to catch him disposing of the body. Gabri and Mondaini are eventually seen as we watch the chickens chow down on human food. Nothing good is gonna come out of that. I mean, poultry that feeds on human flesh seems way worse than any steroids or hormones.

I’ve never seen a movie that straddles being an art film, a drug film, a murder mystery story and a science fiction examination of man trying to change nature, along with psychedelic film techniques and non-linear editing techniques. It’s also a satire of the highest order. I have no idea why people aren’t constantly discussing this movi,e and I’m going to do my best to drive people nuts talking about it over and over again.

As a kid, I was obsessed with seeing Dark Star. This film, which combined the talents of John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon, Ron Cobb, Greg Jein, and Bob Greenberg, was frequently featured in the pages of Starlog.

When I finally saw it — it played theaters until 1980, and then I was able to rent it when I got older — it didn’t live up to what I wanted it to be. Now, watching it as an old man instead of a kid just starting his life, I get it. It finally makes sense to me: even a job in space is totally going to suck, no matter how fantastic the worlds we get to travel to.

Twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets with Thermostellar Triggering Devices so that these worlds don’t threaten future colonization of other planets, the crew of the Dark Star has all gone insane. Or dead, as Commander Powell — voiced by Carpenter — is just a voice from cryostorage.

Lieutenant Doolittle dreams of surfing. Sergeant Pinback — O’Bannon — claims to be Bill Frug, a liquid fuel specialist, and says that the real Pinback is dead. Corporal Boiler has grown obsessed with his mustache. And Talby just watches the universe go by. None of them will be able to escape the crushing ennui of this voyage or a ship that is falling apart, filled with talking bombs that have learned Cartesian doubt.

In the end, all you can do is surf out into nothingness and burn out instead of fading away.

This started as a 45-minute 16mm student project with a $6,000 budget, but to get it into theaters, it needed more footage and to be pushed to 35mm to be shown in theaters. John Landis got the filmmakers in touch with Jack H. Harris, who padded the film some more. O’Bannon would later say that, somehow, “the world’s most impressive student film, ” it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Beyond writing and starring in the movie, O’Bannon also designed several of the film’s special effects, including one of the first usages of hyperspace in a movie. The influence of this movie goes beyond that, as O’Bannon would use the sequences with the evil ball to write Alien and the British show Red Dwarf would take the ball — pun unintended — and run with an entire series based on the themes of this movie.

As for influences on the movie, Phillip K. Dick’s idea of frozen dead people communicating from beyond definitely informs the commander. O’Bannon would later adapt We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Second Variety as Total Recall and Screamers. Plus, while I don’t want to give away the ending, it’s the exact same way that Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope wraps up.

You can watch this on Tubi.