Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd. 

Made for $38,000, this film beat The Horror of Party Beach as the first monster musical by just a few months. It was the brainchild of the man known as Sven Christian, Sven Hellstrom, Harry Nixon, Wolfgang Schmidt, Cindy Lou Steckler, R.D. Steckler, Michael J. Rogers, Michel J. Rogers, Ray Steckler, Cindy Lou Sutters and, of course, Ray Dennis Steckler.

Before he became a B movie director, supposedly Steckler worked at Universal, where he bumped into an A-frame and dropped it onto Alfred Hitchcock. This ignominious exit would soon lead him to a world where he’d make baffling films like The Thrill Killers, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. His adult film titles read like the kind of movies that exist only in my dreams, such as Sexual Satanic Awareness and Sexorcist Devil.

Jerry (Cash Flagg, another name for Steckler, auteuring it up by starring in his own movie), Angela and Harold decide to head out to the carnival, where they watch Marge (Carolyn Brandt, Steckler’s wife; their station wagon is also in the film) dance.

Marge is spooked by a black cat, which leads her to consult with Estrella, a fortune-teller who is throwing acid in peoples’ faces and making them zombies under her control. She predicts death for Marge, as well as a death near water for someone Angela knows.

Jerry falls in with the carnies because Estrella’s sister Carmelita stares him down and does her bad girl dancing to hypnotize him into acts of murder. You know how it goes. Of course, the zombies soon break loose, nearly everyone dies and Jerry is shot on the beach in front of his one true love, making that earlier prediction come true.

Also — dance numbers!

Steckler was a real showman, taking this movie on the road and constantly retitling it with outlandish names like The Incredibly Mixed-Up Zombie, Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. The posters proclaimed that the movie was made in Hallucinogenic Hypnovision, which really meant that at some point, maniacs in rubber masks would run around the theater. If you guessed that Steckler was one of those maniacs, you’d be right.

It was shot at The Film Center Studios, a former Masonic lodge owned by Rock Hudson — yes, I realize that this sounds like the start of a conspiracy story.

Perhaps most strangely — incredible strangely? — the cinematography and camera operating crew included three men who would go on to become major figures in the field.

Joseph V. Mascelli, who also worked on The Thrill Killers and Wild Guitar, wrote The Five Cs of Cinematography. Laszlo Kovacs would work on movies as disparate as A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine and Easy Rider; he was considered a guiding light in the American New Wave. And then there’s Vilmos Zsigmond, whose work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind would win an Oscar (he also worked on The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate).

In his 1987 book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs wrote an essay called “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or, The Day The Airwaves Erupted.” Within, he’d state, “…this flick doesn’t just rebel against, or even disregard, standards of taste and art. In the universe inhabited by The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, such things as standards and responsibility have never been heard of. It is this lunar purity which largely imparts to the film its classic stature. Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and searchers for truth can turn and say, “This was trash!”

Even more astounding, Columbia Pictures threatened to sue over this movie’s original title, The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie. Supposedly the title was too close to the Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Steckler called the studio and demanded to speak to Kubrick, a crazy move, and of course, Kubrick answered and agreed to the new title and the lawsuit was dropped. This whole story feels so insane that it has to be true.

The Severin blu ray release of this film has three hours of bonus features, including an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, two commentaries (one by Ray Dennis Steckler and the other by Joe Bob), an interbiew with Carolyn Brandt, deleted scenes, a VHS trailer and a re-release trailer and a radio ad for Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. You can get this from Severin.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd. 

Satan’s Sadists (1969): Al Adamson made his breakthrough with this movie, going on to direct Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Cinderella 2000, Nurse Sherri and one of the most legitimately unhinged movies I’ve ever survived, Carnival Magic. Even stranger, he was murdered and buried beneath his hot tub in 1995, killed by his live-in contractor Fred Fulford in a plot that could have been one of his films.

However, today we’re talking about his contribution to biker films.

The Satans are a motorcycle club who roam the American Southwest, led by Anchor (Russ Tamblyn, TV’s Twin Peaks) and including Firewater (John “Bud” Cardos, Breaking Point), Acid (Greydon Clark, who directed Satan’s Cheerleaders), Romeo (Bobby Clark, TV’s Casey Jones), Muscle, Willie and Gina (Regina Carrol, Adamson’s wife who appears in nearly all of his films). We’re introduced to the gang as they beat up a man, rape his girlfriend and then push them and their car off a cliff.

They have the bad luck to get in the way of hitchhiker Johnny Martin, a Vietnam vet who is just trying to figure it all out. He gets picked up by Chuck Baldwin (Scott Brady, the sheriff from Gremlins) and his wife Nora. The old man’s a cop and wants to help the young Marine as he travels the highways. They all go to a diner, where we meet Lew (Kent Taylor, half of the inspiration for Superman’s alter ego), the owner, and Tracy, a waitress.

The Satans show up and ruin the budding romance between Johnny and Tracy, as they earn the ire of Chuck and his wife, who tosses a drink in one of their faces. Chuck tries to pull his gun, but the old man’s authority means nothing to the hardened toughs who beat the fuck out of him and rape his woman. Then, they kill all three — but not until Anchor screams out a totally inspired rant:

“You’re right, cop. You’re right, I am a rotten bastard. I admit it. But I tell ya something. Even though I got a lot of hate inside, I got some friends who ain’t got hate inside. They’re filled with nothing but love. Their only crime is growing their hair long, smoking a little grass and getting high, looking at the stars at night, writing poetry in the sand. And what do you do? You bust down their doors, man. Dumb-ass cop. You bust down their doors and you bust down their heads. You put ’em behind bars. And you know something funny? They forgive you. I don’t.”

The Satans don’t leave witnesses. Well, except for our hero and the waitress, who just escaped from Muscle and Romeo. Meanwhile, the gang meets three young girls and start partying with them. Gina can’t take seeing Anchor with other women, so she jumps off a cliff.

Willie tries to kill our heroes, but a rattlesnake saves them (!). Meanwhile, Firewater finds his body and comes to tell Anchor, who has gone insane and murdered all three girls. They fight and Firewater leaves the leader for dead. As he finally finds Johnny and Tracy, he is killed by a landslide (again, nature itself is against the bikers).

Finally, Anchor catches up to them and goes nuts, giving another soliloquy about being Satan. He raises Chuck’s gun to kill everyone, but Johnny simply throws a switchblade at him. “In Vietnam, at least I got paid when I killed people,” he says and at that, he and Tracy ride off on the villain’s cycle.

Satan’s Sadists was filmed at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, CA, at the same time the Manson Family lived there. Some movies would hide this fact. This poster will prove that this one wears it on its bloody sleeve.

Truly, this is a movie that does not give a fuck. Just about no one gets out alive or unscarred. Any moments of pleasure are stolen or taken by force. The poster promises human garbage and this film delivers.

Angel’s Wild Women (1971): After two men assault one of her girls, Margo (Regina Carrol) finds him and whips him. In between this movie being Screaming Eagles and tough women in foreign prison movies getting hot, this was reshot and re-edited to make it fit into the changing world of exploitation. Another thing that changed was while movies had been shot by Al Adamson at the Spahn Ranch for a while, now the specter of the Manson Family hung over everything. So when cult leader King (William Bonner) makes life tough for the bikers and also controls the ranch’s owner Parker (Kent Taylor), you get taken out of the movie and wonder how much of this is based on things Adamson and his crew actually experienced.

Sam Sherman told Filmfax: “We even had some members of the Manson gang in it, people who had been hanging around. I don’t know if they were killers or not. What happened in this instance was one of those things you can’t imagine or even predict.”

Ross Hagen is the hero, as much as anyone in a biker movie can be the hero.

Also known as Commune of Death, a title that leans into the Manson parts of this movie, this is a film that ends with Hagen dropping his motorcycle off a cliff and onto a car, which inexplicably explodes.

Both films are available on one blu ray from Severin. Extras include commentary on both movies by producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman, outtakes, trailers and TV and radio commercials. You can get this from Severin.

Directed by Justin Knodel, who wrote it with Chris Levine (who stars as Nick) and Christopher McGahan, Saint Nick is about Diane (Rachel Alig), who has a business trip over the holidays. Her son Trevor’s (Alex Lizzul) father can’t pick him up, so she’s forced to ask her brother Nick to watch him.

Nick spends all of his time in a bar and is the last person you’d want to watch your kid. But as you’ll learn, spending a week together over the holidays is probably the best thing that could happen to the two of these characters.

Everyone goes above and beyond in this indie comedy to make it way better than you’d expect. It makes fun of the schmaltz of Hallmark holiday movies without falling into the same problems. I had fun with it and if you’re looking something new over the holidays, this might be it.

You can learn more at the official site.

You can watch it on Amazon.

This film promises “An AI generated “Al Gore” exposes the climate scare as a political tool to undermine capitalism and impose big government socialist ideals upon voters.”

Except that the AI for it is from Eleven Labs, the same site I use to create voiceovers for my podcast. It’s AI as much as it’s a program that does voices but it isn’t a program that can take on the mind of another human being and answer questions as them.

Director Joel Gilbert, who worked for Gore when he was a Senator, has learned that Harvard professor Roger Revelle was the source of Gore’s climate alarmism, in spite of Revelle supposedly rejecting those theories.

You may watch this and start to believe that, but there’s also the 2014 movie Merchants of Doubt, in which its explained that alate in his life, Revelle agreed to coauthor a paper with Austrian-born American physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia Fred Singer.

Soon after he agreed to write it, Revelle had a near-fatal heart attack. Singer then wrote most of the paper, including several sections arguing that climate change wasn’t the threat everyone says that it is nor is it understood enough for the government to be involved.

After Revelle’s death, Singer began telling people that Revelle shared his views on climate change. Revelle’s family and graduate student Justin Lancaster claim that Revelle regretted working with Singer and saw global warming as a serious issue up until his death.

Singer sued Lancaster over his claims, but some believe that these lawsuits were to undermine scientific evidence and prevent the public from distinguishing between legitimate and sham research.

Alright, two claims down.

But anyways…

Let me give Joel Gilbert a break and keep on explaining this movie.

Gilbert learned that the real origin of Al Gore’s climate apocalypse came from his time at Vanderbilt Divinity School and also explains how Gore plagiarized a radical environmental book from the 1940s to produce his 1992 manifesto, Earth in the Balance.

Most of this movie is Gilbert confronting what they refer to a an AI generated ‘Al Gore about his entire life story, such as his struggle to fulfill the political ambitions laid out for him by his parents.

Again, if you look at the credits, the AI is used to simulate the voice of Gore. Perhaps it was used to write some of the script, but almost every word feels inserted into the former Vice President’s mouth. There’s also a credit for the lip animation, which is why the “AI” Al Gore looks like he’s saying the words.

By the end of this movie, Gilbert believes that he has exposed “the climate scare as nothing more than a political tool used by groups who wish to undermine free-market capitalism and impose big government socialist ideals upon unsuspecting voters.”

Gilbert is also from Pittsburgh, just like me, so we need to get a beer and talk about the movies he’s made that I’m more interested in, like Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison and Elvis Found Alive. In no way to I want to talk about The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America or Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War For Islamic Revival And Obama’s Politics of Defeat. He’s also made several — many, many — Bob Dylan movies.

I mean, maybe I don’t want that beer. Look at this, from Wikipedia: “In 2019, George Zimmerman, represented by Larry Klayman, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Trayvon Martin’s parents (Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin) as well as Attorney Ben Crump, who had represented the family. Zimmerman’s lawsuit was based on the allegations made in Gilbert’s book.” He also made Dreams from My Real Father, in which he claimed that President Obama’s “real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a communist from Chicago, and that Obama’s mother posed for nude photography.”

He’s also classified his Paul and Elvis movies as mockumentaries before going into political films.

Are we now in a world where we can interview people we always wanted to even if they don’t want to be interviewed, all so they can say exactly what we want them to say?

Seems like it. Ugh.

You can get this from MVD.

I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and didn’t enjoy myself, saying “Am I too old? Did I not grow up on Twitch?”

There were some very interesting comments that I read that explained why it meant something to other people. I went into I Saw the TV Glow with an open mind, as I was hoping I’d find something here that was missing for me.

Happily, I found it.

In 1996, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) feel isolate yet bond over a show called The Pink Opaque, which has Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey “Snail Mail” Jordan) using their psychic powers to save themselves from Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner), who can warp reality.

Owen’s parents are strict and he’s not allowed to stay up late, so he sneaks over to Maddy’s house to watch it. When he can’t, she gives him VHS tapes of it. She confesses that the show is more real to her than life itself.

Two years later, the two decide to run away. Maddy has an abusive stepfather who won’t leave her alone and she gets out. Owen stays behind as people wonder where Maddy went with her mother dying of cancer never seeing her daughter again. The TV show is cancelled. Life moves on.

Ten years later and Owen is still living with his father Frank (Fred Durst) and working in a movie theater. One night, Maddy appears and claims that she’s been living in the show for eight years. She makes Owen rewatch the tape of the last episode, as Mr. Melancholy buries the heroes alive and traps them in the Midnight Realm. He has a nervous breakdown and puts his head through his TV set.

Maddy reveals that she is Tara and that the episodes they watched are the real stories of their lives and reality is the Midnight Realm. She tries to bury Owen alive to show him the truth but he doesn’t go with her again and never sees her again.

Years later, after his father has died of a stroke and he’s moved on to work at an arcade, he watches The Pink Opaque and it isn’t how he remembered. It’s boring and a bit silly, but he has bigger things like being an adult to worry about.

Sixteen years later, Owen is still working in that arcade when he feels like he’s going to die. He makes his way to the bathroom and slices his chest open to reveal a TV playing the show. He staggers back out into the real — is it real? — world, apologizing to everyone.

What would is real? I wonder, Maddy refers to her friend Amanda as a “secret agent sent here to make my life miserable.” Amanda is played by Emma Portner, who is also Mr. Melancholy, Marco and the evil clown. Maybe Maddy is on to something.

If The Pink Opaque came back for a sixth season, its heroines would have climbed out of their own graves, just like Buffy did in season six, episode one of her show.

Katie Pendleton’s (Amanda Jordan) horse sanctuary may be forced to close unless she can convince her grandfather Ben (Stuart Johnson) to show up at a Christmas benefit concert. Yet the one-time bluegrass star has been hiding for years. Why is it closing? Because the Breckenridge family — Jim (Mike Shara) and Grant (David Pinard) — want to race a horse named Chocolate and Katie won’t allow them, so they take all their money away.

Well, Grant actually isn’t all that bad. And he wants to date Katie and learn more about her grandfather because he loves bluegrass. I have no knowledge of this music genre — or horses — so I am the perfect person to review this.

Her grandfather refuses to perform, so he gets country star Claire Crosby (Chelsea Green) to show up. Now this is something I do know. She’s a pro wrestler who used to be Laurel Van Ness in Impact and Reklusa in Lucha Underground, as well as wrestling for Pro WrestlinG Stardom in Japan. Before she came to WWE full-time, she was Daniel Bryan’s physical therapist Megan Miller and in an angle said he cheated on his wife Brie Bella with her.

This has nothing to do with Christmas, horses or bluegrass.

Almost every movie director Marco Deufemia has worked on is a holiday film. Writer Chris Dowling directed and wrote the series Blue Ridge. If you’re looking for a holiday movie that has a concert and horses, well, you came to the right stable.

You can buy this from Mill Creek Entertainment at Deep Discount.

Directed by Jesse Palangio and written by Rossa McPhillips and Simon Phillips, Blood and Snow is going to invite critical comparisons to The Thing, as its about a meteor landing near an oil well in Canada and a woman named Marie (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who is infected by it. She’s taken back to the base by Sebastian (Michael Swatton) and Luke (Simon Phillips) and — as you probably guessed by now — something isn’t right.

It’s always nice to see Vernon Wells in a movie. Here, he’s The Professor, one of the few scientists who might be able to figure this out. As for Marie, she wants to spread the virus inside her, starting with the rescue team that is coming to save everyone.

This obviously has nowhere near the budget that it needs to have, nor does the way too quick ending close things up the right way. But for what it cost — and tempered expectations — it’s a fine cold weather alien movie. There’s hardly any gore, either. Movies don’t need it, but when you’re expecting something based on what this is cribbing notes from, a little guts would be lovely.

The Cleopatra Entertainment blu ray of this movie has a trailer and slide show. You can buy it from MVD.

You can also watch it on Tubi.