When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend, who wore her stockings on his face, make out. Their mother was so upset that she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn’t work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that’s only the first few minutes of this one!

Now we’re in the present, and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the film’s director, Ulli Lommel, and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle, and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna’s real-life brother) on a farm. Willy’s never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn’t talk and often steals knives.

Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter, and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.

And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that they must face their fears and return to their childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes shithouse and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.

The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.

The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitating pitchforks, ripping off Lacey’s shirt and impaling young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You’ve taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying, too, right? In 1980, Jake decides to bring in a priest to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror’s control over her.

That’s when the best solution comes up — let’s just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son exiting a graveyard. Oh, no — a piece of the mirror is on her son’s shoe!

I was wondering where many of the plot points of this movie would go, and they often get lost, as if this were a foreign film. But it isn’t!  So, I did some research on the director, Ulli Lommel.

Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder’s surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director’s films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who was involved in his films, including Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.

Seriously — a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cutting her own throat with scissors, a child getting his neck broken, and a priest getting his face melted? The acting is horrible — but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people’s eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

Part of me wants to make fun of this movie. But another part of me wants to protect it from mean people who say things like it lacks attention to detail. Or the fact that none of its characters appear to be actual human beings. And the camera angles are more reminiscent of Dad not knowing how to use the video camera than art. But yet, I love this. I want to love it more, but I love what it can be more than what it is.

The Boogeyman was followed by two sequels that utilize footage — a lot of footage — from the original.

Ellie (Tiffany Bolling, The Candy Snatchers) and Myra Thomas (Robin Mattson, Candy Stripe Nurses) leave behind their abusive stepfather with a shotgun blast and make their way to Los Angeles and the home of their Uncle Ben (Scott Brady), who involves the two of them in a moey-laundering scheme. But Ellie knows the score and soon takes the money for herself, instructing her sister to meet her and Larry (Steven Sandor), the mark she’s conned, in El Paso. But things aren’t going to work out for them.

Director and writer Arthur Marks’ father was an assistant director on The Wizard of Oz and spent thirty years at MGM, which is where Arthur worked in the production department. His films, The Roommates, Detroit 9000, Bucktown, J.D.’s Revenge, Friday Foster, The Monkey Hu$tle, The Centerfold Girls and Linda Lovelace for President all filled a need big studios could care less about: drive-in programmers.

Every man in this movie is scum. There’s a moment in the beginning where a whole bunch of old men get drunk, sweaty and strange, sexually harassing Ellie who responds with sheer hatred. Was I in love? You know it. This also has Eddy (Alex Rocco) and Digger (Tim Brown) as two killers who in no way were totally taken by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. Oh, he titled a chapter “The Bonnie Situation?” Well, at least he admits it.

Making his way to England instead of Staten Island, Andy Milligan created a vampire movie in which Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) has an entire family of vampires — a wife who doesn’t speak, three green-skinned vampire women and a hunchback named Spool — living in Carfax Abbey.

Inbreeding is destroying this vampiric brood, so he calls out to America for more family members to add to the DNA and increase their chances of survival.

To get this on film, Milligan handmade costumes and smeared vaseline all over the lens. As always, he also had everyone scream at the top of their lungs.

Spool is abused throughout the movie, even when he’s trying to do the right thing and save the victims.

Many people seem to dislike this movie, and, to be honest, maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome because I watched so many Andy Milligan movies in the same week, but I’m not seeing the same film that they have. I kind of fall into a drone dream when I watch these, letting them wash over me and take away the world that I don’t want to be in. I feel sad for others who can’t use these movies in the same way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The first horror film in history to be shot on video, Boardinghouse is… well, there really isn’t anything else like it. Somehow, this movie seems at once ten minutes and ten hours long, taking you on a journey into — man, I’ve no idea how we got here or where we’ve been, but we really went somewhere.

Back in 1972, Dr. Hoffman and his wife — who one assumes were doctors of the occult — died in their Mulholland Drive home on the night of their anniversary, committing double suicide in front of their daughter Debbie, who had a nervous breakdown. Everyone who has lived in the house since has died. And now, a decade later, the nephew of the last owner of the home, James Royce, puts out an ad looking for single women — beautiful women with no ties — to move in with him — he plans on you know, studying the occult while they’re there — so Sandy, Suzie, Cindy, Gloria, Pam, Terri and — you know it — Debbie all move in.

To say this movie has a disjointed narrative is like saying that you’re reading this on a website.

James is also trying to get with Victoria, a singer, and shows her how she can use her own latent telekinetic powers. After a dream in which she is dragged to the grave of Dr. Hoffman, she begins to grow jealous of the women of the boardinghouse who are all potentially sleeping with the occult master that she has come to love.

Oh man, before you know it, people are throwing cake at one another, women are clawing their eyes out, Debbie revealing herself as the psychic monster who killed both her parents after sleeping with her father, Jim shows up with less clothes in every scene and the end credits look like they came from a Apple 2E.

Directed by, written and starring John Wintergate, this is the kind of movie that defies description, despite my writing so many words about it already. It has a lead actress with one name — Kalassu. And she’s the wife of Wintergate and their children show up. And then there are monsters, hallucinations and bloody showers. And the cut I watched has a running time of 2 hours and 38 minutes.

This movie was also shot in Horror-Vision, which is a swirl of color and a glove, and it’s supposed to warn you when something scary happens, but nothing like that seems to happen, and man, they blew this up on film and played it in theaters, and Wintergate must have quite the thong collection.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When you see the names Brian Trenchard-Smith and Nico Mastorakis listed as producers, you know that you’re probably getting into something good. Also known as Demon Island, this film was directed by Richard Jefferies, who is perhaps better known for the films he wrote, such as Scarecrows and Cold Creek Manor. He has directed only one other film, the 2008 TV movie Living Hell.

It’s funny, when I discussed this movie earlier today with Bill from Groovy Doom, he referred to it as “the monster movie with no monster.” That’s an apt description.

It’s also about a treasure hunter named Frye (James Earl Jones) whose underwater scavenging brings back an ancient sea monster that demands virgin blood.

Meanwhile, Neil and Sherry (Martin Kove and Mary Louise Weller, who appeared in Q The Winged Serpent the same year as this movie) have come to the island looking for his missing sister Madeline (Deborah Shelton, who also sings the song over the end credits with her then-husband Shuki Levy). Plus, Lydia Cornell stops hanging out with Cosmic Cow on Too Close for Comfort and shows up as Jones’ girlfriend.

Inexplicably, Lila Kedrova from Zorba the Greek and Jose Farrar — well, he’s less of a surprise as Jose may have been the first actor to win the National Medal of Arts, but he’s also in spectacular junk like The Sentinel, Bloody Birthday and The Being — both appear.

Arrow’s write-up promised “blood, nudity and beachside aerobics.” This delivered, as well as some great dream sequences and moments where beachfront rituals seem to go on forever. That said, I had a blast with this movie, as any film that features Martin Kove skipping around the waves, showcasing a miniature engine, while the ladies go wild, and James Earl Jones is involved, will hold my attention.

Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd, to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) for disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies, where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also excessively melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Identical blonde twins Todd and Terry are at the drive-in with their mother, who is making out with her boyfriend in the front seat. Seeing so many people having sex — including his mom — from the back seat flips out Terry, who starts killing people with a hatchet. He smears the blood all over his brother, because that’s how forensics worked in the 1980s, and he escapes scot free. That’s how Blood Rage — one of the few films to be set on Thanksgiving — begins.

Ten years later, Terry (Mark Soper in a dual role) lives with his mother (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star Louise Lasser). On the night of Thanksgiving, Mom reveals that she’s about to marry Brad. We also learn that Todd has escaped from the mental hospital. Terry doubles down to keep his brother locked up by killing Brad by chopping off his right hand — which still clutches a can of Old Style — before splitting his head in half with a machete.

Todd’s doctor and her assistant are looking for him, but run into Terry, who stabs and dismembers both of them before hooking up with new neighbor Andrea who is planning a house party.

Meanwhile, Mom is freaking out learning that Todd is getting closer, but Terry is the one we should be worried about. He’s on a real tear, wiping out all sorts of people, like a tennis-playing couple. All manner of mistaken identity occurs, ending with a swimming pool battle between the twin brothers, and Mom kills Terry when she really wanted to kill Todd. And oh yeah — her incestual relationship with her son is revealed as the reason for his insanity. She blows her brains out and Todd just stands there as the police close in.

This movie is also Nightmare at Shadow Woods, with none of the gore left. You should avoid that one as the real reason to enjoy this — I mean, unless you enjoy 1980s films about incest — is the rampant gore.

Come for Ted Raimi, condom salesman. Stay for hatchets to the face and a doctor’s assistant sliced in half, as well as rampant synth music from Richard Einhorn, who also scored Shock Waves and Don’t Go in the House. It was directed by John Grissmer, who was also behind 1973’s The Bride (Last House on Massacre Street).

You can get the art on this post at Tim Monsters!

Matt Cimber has pretty much lived a life—he was married to Jayne Mansfield, he created the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and he directed movies like Butterfly, The Witch Who Came from the Sea and Hundra, amongst others. In 1973, he convinced six currently playing NFL stars to appear in a black version of the biker film. The results? Amazing.

The Black Six is made up of six All-Pro NFL stars:

• Gene Washington, San Francisco 49ers (who was also in Cimber’s Lady Cocoa and Airport ’75)
• Willie Lanier, Kansas City Chiefs (who is in the NFL Hall of Fame and was named to the NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team)
• Carl Eller, Minnesota Vikings (an NFL Hall of Famer who went on to found substance abuse clinics)
• Mercury Morris, Miami Dolphins (a Pittsburgh native who was drafted to West Texas State, the alma mater of tons of pro wrestlers, including Tully Blanchard, Stan Hansen, Ted DiBiase, Dusty Rhodes and both Funk brothers to name but a few)
• Lem Barney, Detroit Lions (an NFL Hall of Famer who sang backup on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and played himself in Paper Lion)
• Joe Greene, Pittsburgh Steelers (one of my hometown heroes, Greene is probably one of the greatest — if not the greatest — Steelers ever. He  appeared in a famous Coke commercial, as well as Fighting Back: The Rocky Bleier Story and Smokey and the Bandit II and is also an NFL Hall of Famer)

Washington already had some acting experience, so he stars as Bubba Daniels, a Vietnam War vet who returns home to find that his brother has been killed by a white supremacist biker gang. Their leader, Thor, is played by Ben Davidson, an avid real-life biker who played for the Oakland Raiders. You can also see him in M*A*S*H*, Conan the Barbarian and as Porter the Bouncer in Behind the Green Door.

Bubba and his gang — the Black Six — decide to avenge that death, which leads to battles with racist townies, uncaring police and Thor’s gang. The final battle ends with Thor blowing up his own bike to kill them all or so it would seem. According to Mercury M, orris’ book Against the Grain, the players protested that ending — guess they didn’t realize that nearly every biker movie ends with the heroes getting killed — so that’s why the movie ends with the title card that says “Honky, look out…Hassle a brother, and the Black 6 will return!” 

It’s all pretty depressing stuff, to be honest. But you can say that for nearly all biker and blaxploitation cinema. It’s still amazing to be that at one point, the NFL didn’t have the control that it does today and that six of its biggest stars could go off and make a movie together.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tim Brown played football and acted, but because of the success of Jim Brown, who did the same things, he had to change his name to Timothy Brown. He stars in this as “Kicks” Carter, a Vegas cop fighting Ziggy’s (Russ Tamblyn) gang. He has to get revenge for his partner’s death and handle TV reporter Stephanie Adams (Tanya Boyd). Also, fight gun runners and save women from a house of ill repute. That’s a lot of work.

Directed by Al Adamson and written by John D’Amato, Sheldon Lee and Budd Donnelly, this is also known as The Murder Gang and Girl’s Hotel.

Regina Carroll shows up—well, she was Adamson’s wife—and so do Jana Bellan (Mary Lou from Sixpack Annie) and Adamson stock player Geoffrey Land. It seems like Tamblyn is having a lot of fun being an absolute lunatic, and he makes this worth watching.

Lee Frost was behind some strange films like Race With the Devil, Love Camp 7, Chain Gang Women and The Thing with Two Heads. None of those films will prepare you for this one. After all, how does one prepare for a movie where an army of black men gets inspired by the wrong side of World War II and becomes the new master race?

General Ahmed (Rod Perry of TV’s S.W.A.T.) starts a People’s Army to protect the black people of Watts. Still, after chasing the drug dealers out of town, his second-in-command, Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson, who played Fabulous from Sugar Hill and would go on to be Mac on TV’s Night Court), takes over, turning the group into a fascist paramilitary outfit that controls every racket in town.

With a concept like that, you’d hope that the film itself would be more out of control. Sadly, it isn’t. That said, Uschi Digard shows up, and really, that’s worth seeing the film in the first place. Comparing the Black Panthers to the Third Reich and castration are things that you don’t see in movies any longer. I’d argue that this is the lone movie that combines both.

You can watch this on Tubi.