Somewhere after the end of the world, somewhere in France, Calpet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), the landlord, murders and slices up his victims to sell as meat to his hungry tenants. A clown named Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers the latest help wanted ad that brings in bodies, but he’s such a good worker that no one wants to kill him. He’s also fallen in love with Calpet’s daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac).

She loves him so much that to save him, she works with the Troglodistes, vegetarian underground soldiers who are trying to make the world safe and maybe a little less cannibalistic. Instead of Louison, they rescue Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard), who, like every tenant, wants the clown to die so that they can stay well-fed.

The directors would go on to make City of Lost Children together, and Jeunet also directed Amélie and Alien Resurrection. When the Troglodistes initially appear in this, he claims it is his tribute to the original Alien and how the xenomorph is revealed.

Presented in the U.S. by Terry Gilliam, this film feels like something exists to be discovered in every frame. It’s childlike while also frightening in what it depicts. And Jess Franco vet Howard Vernon is in it!

I’m so glad to have this new Severin release. I’d never seen anything like it before, and now I want to watch each moment again and again.

The Severin 4K UHD and Blu-Ray release of Delicatessan includes a commentary by co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, an interview with Jeunet and co-director Marc Caro, a making-of, an interview with Terry Gilliam, a trailer, interviews with nearly everyone in the cast and crew, a short by the directors called Le Bunker De La Dernière Rafale, Jean-Pierre Jeunet archives and an exclusive book by Claire Donner of The Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies. You can get it from Severin.

I have no idea what’s in the water in Miranda, California, but wow.

Hitler himself — now Adolf Schwartz (Edward Schaaf) — lives in a Bavarian castle there, in a pentuple with The Headsperson (Candy Samples, using the name Mary Gavin; she’s also in Fantasm and Fantasm Comes Again, as well as Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, playing The Very Big Blonde, which sums her up), The Ethiopian Chef (Elaine Collins, Deep Jaws), Limehouse (Su Ling, Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks) and Paul (Robert McLane, one of the first actors to appear in a movie that accurately depicted gay lovemaking, A Very Natural Thing). After a scene where every one of his lovers abuses him, he retires to a bubble bath where he is killed by a black-gloved killer who throws a piranha in the tub.

Is this a Giallo?

No, as much as it’s a Greek tragedy just because it has Kitten Natividad as the Greek Chrous. Born Francesca Isabel Natividad in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, she went from not knowing English until she was ten to being her Texas high school class president. A maid and a cook to Stella Stevens, she enlarged her bust and started dancing, eventually gaining a 44G bra size. By the second movie she made with Meyer, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, she’d had another breast surgery and left her husband for the auteur. She kept on dancing, doing nude photograph and eventually hardcore porn, as well as being the stripper for Sean Penn’s bachelor party before he married Madonna.

But yeah, she’s the Greek Chorus. It’s incredible.

Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix, who designed her own costumes and did her own stunts; it’s hard to say which of Meyer’s women is the most perfect, but you can make a case for her; supposedly she was once engaged to Greg “The Hammer” Valentine) hitchikes into town and is instantly in trouble, making Sheriff Homer Johnson (Monty Bane) hot and bothered and then being insulted by local rich kid Leonard Box (Larry Dean), who she kills in self-defense, which gets her into Johnson’s bed.

To keep her busy — and out of other beds — Homer gets her a job at Alice’s (Janet Wood, Pamela from Terror at Red Wolf Inn) diner, where Alice’s husband Paul — yes, the same one who porked Hitler’s keister — also works. Paul and Margo soon make love at the edge of a lake, while the Sheriff gets head from Chesty Young Thing (Marianne Marks) and is nearly caught in bed with Pocahontas (Foxe Lae).

At this point, Margo decides to strip in public and is attacked not only by a limberjack named Rafe (Bob Schott) but every man in the place. Homer saves her, but he and Rafe murder one another.

Then, Margo reveals that she’s a secret agent, out to learn who killed Hitler. It turns out it was Alice, Eva Braun Jr., who chases our heroine through the scenic landscape, both nude, before they make up and start, well, making out. Paul shows up and shoots her — she wanted revenge for him buggering the Fuhrer, he wanted revenge because he loved the guy — and Margo ends up arresting both of them.

Shot around the summer cabin of Wilfred Bud Kues, a war buddy of Meyer’s for decades, this found Russ and Roger Ebert working together again to make a movie that has men somehow recover from axe wounds, a masked killer, overwritten dialogue in the best way and one of Meyer’s last movies that finds him going out in a way that he could be proud of.

Scanned in 4K from the original negative by Severin Films with new and archival special features curated in association with The Russ Meyer Trust, the Severin release of Russ Meyer’s Up! comes with audio commentary by film historian Elizabeth Purchell, an interview with actress Raven De La Croix and a radio commercial. You can get it from Severin.

Made just before Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho has bikers Brahmin (Steve Oliver), Slick (Thomas Scott) and Rufus (F. Rufus Owens) assaulting women and killing their husbands. Their next victim is Gail Maddox (Holle K. Winters), the wife of veterinarian Cory Maddox (Alex Rocco). As he gets her to the hospital, the gang have already tracked their next victim, Ruby Bonner (Haji, who seriously seems to be some kind of goddess from another planet*), the way too young wife of Harry Bonner (Coleman Francis), who she hates with all her being. They’re both shot and left for dead, but Cory saves her and says he can take her as far as the next town. He wants to kill everyone who dared touch his wife.

There’s an incredible scene where a snake bites Cory and he demands that Ruby suck the poison out. It gets wild, let me tell you. “Suck it!” he keeps yelling. Man, Russ Meyer is anything but subtle.

I imagine that this story is taking place in the same desert as Pussycat! and we’re just lucky that the male bikers never met Varla, Rosie and Billie.

Haji’s real name was Barbarella Catton. Beyond the two Meyer movies mentioned already, she’s also in his movies Good Morning and… Goodbye!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens. She started exotic dancing at the age of 14 and she wrote most of her dialogue in his movies. I’m overjoyed by the fact that she’s also in Demonoid, one of my favorite movies, as well as Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Bigfoot,  and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, using the name Haji Cat. She continued performing in burlesque shows until a year before her death in 2013.

* I have evidence. She told Chris Poggiali, “I’ve always claimed that I’m just a visitor from another place, here to restore energy to my body. My mother was from another galaxy. She brought me here, and we settled in Quebec, but I’ve been here many times before that.”

Extras include commentary by film historian Elizabeth Purchell and filmmaker Zach Clark; interviews with Haji and Alex Rocco and a trailer. Get it from Severin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

As I logged another film in my Letterboxd list, a list that is now approaching 5,000 films, I paused a moment to reflect. I’ve been a film buff all my life, well over 50 years, and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a film on a small budget. Back in the day, even as a pre-teen, I recognized that Hammer Film’s The Gorgon, with my childhood heroes Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, was a good horror film, despite some shaky sets and special effects (hey, look at the wobbly sets and the phony snakes in the Gorgon’s hair!). Unlike haughty film snobs, I’ve always tried to temper my expectations and not dismiss a film simply because the filmmakers had limited resources. With the advent of affordable technology, now anyone can make a film. Most efforts, however, turn out as you’d expect: unwatchable amateur hours, filled with boneheaded dialogue, sub-community-theater acting, badly composed shots with terrible lighting, mismatched edits, and poorly recorded sound. I’ve spent many soul-crushing hours with my eyes glazing over watching things where the only positive comments I could make were that “it’s a film,” though just barely, and congratulate the filmmakers for a successful sale to some streaming service. But once in a while, when folks with brains, talent, and big hearts make a micro-budget film, you get something special. This brings us to Left One Alive, the new film from Columbia, South Carolina filmmaker David Axe. And special it is.

Left One Alive ponders the implications of what happens when horror movies end, particularly those horror movies where the final girl vanquishes the monsters and walks out of the woods into the sunlight just before the final credits roll. Axe’s intelligent screenplay tells us what’s next. Sarah (Cailyn Sam) is the final girl. She has survived after having witnessed the mass slaughter of all her camping friends by weird forest creatures. Until that horrific event, she’d led a normal, mundane life living with her sister in some part of small-town America. We don’t explicitly learn a lot about what that life was like, but economical writing allows us to connect the dots. Then her life changes forever. If you thought for a minute how it would, you’d ask yourself: Will there be post-traumatic stress disorder? Of course. Survivor’s guilt? Yep. A film based on her tragic experience? Sure. The scenes depicting the ridiculous Hollywood version of what happened are hilarious and reminded me of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, a wonderful small film also about some serious existential issues, though with a substantially bigger budget, indie great John Sayles and special-effects legend Douglas Trumball as executive producers, and Sam Elliott in a career-best performance.

These are things that you won’t find in your mine-run horror film, and I was delighted by where this film took me. It doesn’t have a lot of violence, there’s no nudity, and I think I could count on one hand the number of obscenities spoken. It’s a slow, steadily paced, always engaging film, which straddles the line between exploitation and art film, though leaning hard toward the art-film side. While it’s a small film, it’s ambitious. Acting is serviceable or better, with star Cailyn Sam giving a particularly nice performance. Writer/producer/director Axe, abetted by producer/cinematographer/editor Sarah Massey, accomplished what most micro-budget filmmakers only dream of achieving: a film with good cinematography, some modest—yet effective—sound design, and an on-point score. Or as Variety used to say when I read it as a teenager, “Tech credits are pro.” There’s one amazing aerial shot of the forest that was not done with a drone. I’d thought the production, like Herschell Gordon Lewis for 2000 Maniacs over 60 years ago, had secured the use of a bucket truck for a day. That was until I saw behind-the-scenes photos of the plucky Massey in a sling being hoisted high into the air. This can-do spirit forms the film’s DNA and demonstrates what’s possible, even on a budget of $50,000. 

At the end of Left One Alive, the forest creatures referred to in winking fashion by the name of a popular, albeit weird, children’s TV show return to complete Sarah’s character arc. They’re hokey, yet charming, which made me love the film even more. So when the end credits came up, featuring shots from the film done in a style that would feel at home in a $200 million Marvel film, I was left to ponder what happens next. And that, my friends, leads me to tell Axe and company what I hope happens next: they make more films.

Left One Alive is currently streaming on several platforms.