Look, when a movie has two martial artists named Joey (Tien-Chi Cheng) and Gary (Lu Feng), well, that’s all I need. Except that this movie is really as wild as it can get, a low budget film from Chang Cheh who decides that if he can’t get enough money to make a movie, he’s going to make the film version of some drug that hasn’t been invented yet.

Joey and Gary’s parents — Master Gan (Chang Peng) and Supervisor Zuo (Wong Tak-Sang) — are killed by some poison and palace intrigue. When Joey runs, he somehow ends up in Hell, where Satan Chris (Lee Kin-Sang) offers him the ability to come back upstairs and have the powers of nine demons, as long as the demons are given blood to drink and Joey knows that someday soon, he will also become a demon.

These demons are eight children who dance around and their mother (Wong Gwan), who starts so much of the blood raving. They live as skulls that Joey carries, but he can call on their power whenever he needs it. You know how the martial world works, however, as even when Joey gets revenge, the battles don’t stop and he starts to become the monsters he has been always destined to become.

Three of the Venoms — Chiang Sheng, Lu Feng and Ricky Cheng — are in this, but the reason to watch this is that it’s non-stop fog, neon lights, in-camera magic tricks and the kind of outfits that Chang Cheh likes to see men in: glam rock, but somehow more feminine, with heavy makeup. Also: there’s an ice skating fight and a Buddhist master saves the day with some spells.

I know of no other movie where the fights are called Joey and Gary. It really is something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Edgar Allan Lovecraft (Steve Westerheit) is the brainy outcast of the hard-partying Delta Epsilon Delta Fraternity and now, he’s invented — you guessed it — a reanimator formula.

In the video store era, the box art and title were all you needed. So if you combine long rental favorites Police Academy and Re-Animator, you get this.

The Delta Epsilon Delta (DED) frat is all about partying. Except for the aforementioned Edgar Allan Lovecraft, who is busy bringing a severed head named Fred back to life, which brings in a local gangster, Mugsy, who wants Edgar to do the same for his girl, Hotlips (executive producer Connier Speer, who was also in Nail Gun Massacre). Things don’t go to plan as the reanimated gangster’s moll starts killing the student body. Can Edgar, Mugsy, his henchman Bruno, and Fred the severed head stop her?

Directed and written by Judith Priest — a one-and-done talent who may or may not be someone else — this was set up by Fred Olen Ray with David DeCoteau (using the name Ellen Cabot, which comes from an episode of Batman) producing. The instructions? “Give a good title and make it 70 minutes and horror.”

Shot on 8mm consumer format with a two-month turnaround from script to final product, it was shot over a weekend. And there was a Super VHS on hand to edit the dailies. It was co-written by Benton Jennings, who was also Bruno.  He’s also in tons of movies and TV shows: Highway to Hell, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Profiler, Dexter, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, American Carol, the soap opera Passions, Our Flag Means Death and I Think You Should Leave. He also played Alex Trebek’s dead body on Jimmy Kimmel in addition to Hitler on that show, a role he’d play again in Poolboy: Drowning In Fury. He was also the historical consultant on Frontier: The Decisive Battles and Last of the Mohicans.

This movie has so many talented people making it, including Greg Synodis, who composed the music for this and Highway to Hell, while also making the music videos for “Ice Ice Baby” and “Play That Funky Music” for Vanilla Ice. There’s also JP Black, who shot and starred in Redneck County Fever; as well as assistant director Richard Perrin, who was in Bret McCormick’s Blood On the Badge and Fred Williamson’s Steele’s Law. Plus, you get Fred the Head, who has a list of credits a forehead long. He was in Head, A Bullet to the Head, Sergeant Deadhead, A Hole In the Head, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte. Virginia Leith is his mom, or so he says.

Released to video on February 28, 1992, this was filmed in Fort Worth, Texas — a clue to who the person who made this is, and shows up in the Tomb of Terrors box set along with such other incredible movies as Demon Sex, Granny, Gorno: An American Tragedy, Kill the Scream Queen, The Night Owl, Purvos, Redneck County Fever, Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death and Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires.

Is this made by movie lovers? All I can say is that in the frat house scene, you can see posters for Zachariah, Terror Circus (Barn of the Naked Dead), School Spirit and America 3000.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tibor Takács made some wild movies, but before that, he was part of the Toronto-area punk and metal scene as the manager and producer for The Viletones and The Cardboard Brains, some of whom end up in this 1978 rock opera. Sure, he makes streaming Christmas movies now, but he once made The Gate and the insane I, Madman.

Written by Stephen Zoller, this feels like The Man Who Fell to Earth meeting The Rocky Horror Picture Show as well as Phantom of the Paradise and The Foreigner, but that’s just me trying to put some handle on this.

Max the Promoter (John-Paul Young, lead singer of The Cardboard Brains) has hired private detective Philip Chandler (Richard Ward Allen) to find The Messiah (David Jensen of the band Kickback), who is preaching to the teens of Anywhere City that rock and roll is filled with sin. Max either wants him to be a star or dead or both, while Violet (Liane Hogan) and the Children of Truth want him hooked on drugs.

The music in this feels early 70s glam rock but that just helps this seem even weirder, as does the Third Reich crowd noises in the final concert, as the Metal Messiah — spoiler warning — because a religious rock star and gets crucified to the cheers of the assembled crowd.

This was a stage play and that makes sense. What doesn’t is how much this movie seems to hate rock and roll while being a rock opera. The evils of music would stay with Takács, as the album The Dark Book would open quite literally The Gate once he learned how to hone his filmmaking.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Chuck McCann (Chuck McCann, The Girl Most Likely to… and the co-creator of Far Out Space Nuts with Bob Denver) is a projectionist at the Midtown Theater, which is run by the always angry Renaldi (this is Rodney Dangerfield’s first movie). Stuck in the booth with no one else for hours at a time, McCann watches movies all day and dreams of being a superhero, Captain Flash, with Renaldi as The Bat.

McCann was a gifted voice actor, so he does tons of impressions in this, including Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Butterfly McQueen and Laurel and Hardy. He was a big fan of the comedy duo, hosting the New York City kid show Laurel and Hardy and Chuck. He often played Oliver Hardy in commercials with Jim MacGeorge as Stan Laurel. He was one of the five founding members of The Sons of the Desert, a Laurel and Hardy appreciation group, along with their official biographer Jim McCabe, Orson Bean, cartoonist Al Kilgore and John Municino. And then he dreams of The Girl (Ina Balin) and rescuing her from The Bat.

Director and writer Harry Hurwitz also made the adult Fairy Tales, Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula and Auditions as Harry Tampa, as well as Safari 3000, That’s Adequate, Buster Krabb’s last movie The Comback Trail, Safari 3000 and he wrote Under the Rainbow.

You can spot several interesting people in this: David Holliday (the voice of Virgil Tracy on Thunderbirds), cinematographer João Fernandes (who shot Deep Throat, The Devil In Ms. Jones, Bloodrage, Invasion U.S.A., The Prowler, Children of the Corn, Human Experiments, The Nesting, The Kirlian Witness, Let Me Die a Woman, The Taking of Christina, Legacy of Blood, Deadly Weapons and directed three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, as he worked with Chuck Norris many times), Lucky Kargo (who is also in Cauliflower Cupids and Barry Mahon’s Sex Club International as Lucky Bang Bang), Sam Stewart (Bad Girls Go to Hell, The Girl from S.I.N.), Alex Stevens (a werewolf from 23 episodes of Dark Shadows), bellydancer Morocco, Robert Staats (Night Call Nurses, Mr. Billion), Robert King (who is in tons of late period Jess Franco movies such as Lust for Frankenstein, Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell and Blind Target), Rita Bennett (who played a strippeer in Raging Bull, All That Jazz and Danny Steinmann’s High Rise using the stage name Elizabeth Sunburst) and it’s all shot by Victor Petrashevic, who also was the cinematographer on Behind Locked Doors, Massage Parlot Murders!, The Minx, Gathering of Evil and the director of Love Me…Please!

I have no idea how this was able to just take scenes from Casablanca, Gunga Din, Sergeant York, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Fort Apache, The Birth of a Nation, The Maltese Falcon and Barbarella, but there you go. There are even some fake trailers, but the best part of all of this is getting to see the theaters of Times Square all the way back in 1970.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Pierce Jackson Dawn (Randal Malone) was one of the greatest make-up artists of the early 20th century. However, his death is quite strange. It came after he wanted to work with horror stars Pratt Borokov (Tim Sullivan) and Janos Blasko (director and writer Ron Ford) for producer Leonard Schein (Wes Deitrick), even if Blasko has overdosed and Borokov must be convinced through death and reanimation to make the movie. Yet instead of acting, they start to kill.

Featuring interview segments with David DeCoteau, Conrad Brooks, silent star Anita Page and former Hollywood starlet Margaret O’Brien, this is basically Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff coming back from the dead to destroy unsuspecting people. For that alone, as well as how it’s shot kind of like a documentary, you have to enjoy it. It’s a low, low, low budget affair, yet when has that stopped a movie from being worthwhile?

If you love old movies and didn’t have any worries about watching movies no matter what format they were shot in, you’re going to love this. If you demand things have an actual budget and not spend time throwing deep cut horror jokes at you, well…

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Mask of Satan was also released as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil in the U.S. and Japan. If you want me to explain all that, you can click here.

This is part of the Sabbath TV series which also includes Pedro Olea’s La leyenda del cura de Bargota, Imanol Uribe’s La Luna Negra, António de Macedo’s The Curse of Marialva, Daniel Wronecki’s María la Loba and Gertrud Pinkus’ Anna Goldin, la última bruja.

A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michele Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from movies in the Demons series. Soon, they find a metal mask — this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they find an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments for her revenge.

Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it. That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, who often read it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he decided Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.

Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancé Klaus Kinski here; she’s in the Kinski-directed Paganini and the Tinto Brass movie Iaprika) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?

There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun of, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. You just may get what you wish for. Speaking of the cast, Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman, as the demonic form of Anibas. What a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old teats and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws. At the same time, she spits white fluid all over. She also has the facial scars Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s version. Plus, Stanko Molnar is in the cast as a weird priest. He showed up often in Bava’s early movies like Macabre and A Blade In the Dark. He’s also in the Antonio Margheriti TV mini-series Treasure Island In Space, which has an insane cast: Anthony Quinn, Philippe Leroy, David Warbeck, Ernest Borgnine, Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Bobby Rhodes.

This is a hard movie to review, as you must compare it to one of the greatest movies ever. Even Lamberto, I think, would admit that his father remains the best director. But his son tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sunday is the kind of film that will live forever. Lamberto was able to create some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Mask and did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sect and Cemetery Man.

It has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.

It’s entertaining, as all Italian late in the game horror is to me. And that’s enough to recommend it to you.

Severin has released the North American Blu-ray premiere of this film, which has interviews with Bava, Mary Sellers and Deborah Caprioglio. It looks great and I love that I can get rid of my bootleg, which looked like it was multiple generations of VHS dubbed to DVD. Please, Severin — more Lamberto late 80s releases please.

You can get this from Severin.