EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

This is directed by Jay Woelfel, who has made a ton of movies, but perhaps is best known for Beyond Dreams Door.

In his director’s notes for this, he said: “Asylum of Darkness originally came about directly from the release of my first feature film, Beyond Dreams Door, made in my hometown of Columbus Ohio and released in 1989. The sales reps for that film claimed to want to make other films with the team that had made that film. So I embarked on a journey of writing long treatments for film after film for them, I think six at least. One of these was/is Asylum of Darkness . They, the sales reps, liked the elements in Beyond Dreams Door that questioned what was real and what wasn’t. They encouraged me to do something like that again saying “that is what you do best.” So I wrote a 30 page treatment, not about Dream reality, but in this case Insane Reality. A main character who is insane and knows that most of what he sees is insane. A key element to this premise being that, what he doesn’t know, is that insane people actually see beyond what we would call daily reality. Only they can see into a supernatural insane reality of shapeshifting demons that move behind the scenes of a sane person’s view of life. I liked the faceless “ghosts” that appear in Japanese ghost stories and those would be our main character’s chief rivals. The reps said that in the treatment, they couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. That was my whole point.”

Shot on 35mm, starring the same star from Beyond Dreams Door — Nick Baldasare — and having a plot that has so many twists and turns that it packs ten movies into its two plus hours, if this came out from Neon or A24, people would be obsessively masturbating over it to the point that you’d wonder how a movie could be that good. But no, this is a movie made by someone they’ve never heard of, hiding in the mom and pop video store that is Tubi, collecting virtual dust while lunatics like you and me are about to obsessively masturbate over it.

Or maybe you’ll feel like this reviewer, who said, “…one of the most schizophrenic films I have ever seen. Everything about it, from the acting to the directing to the music and everything in between, feels like everyone involved kept changing their minds every other day about what kind of movie they wanted to make.”

Dwight (Baldasare) is trapped in a mental institution as he’s committed murder but his lawyers got him a not guilty by means of insanity plea. There, he becomes friends with Van Gogh (Frank Jones Jr.), a man who removes his eye when he sees something that he can’t handle, and is treated by Dr. Shaker (Richard Hatch), who sometimes appears to be a skeleton. He escapes, running across the road and causing a crash that causes his spirit to cross over with a rich man named Artimus Finch.

He soon falls in love with that man’s abused wife Ellen (Amanda Howell) and takes over his life, taking on the vices and behaviors of someone who he wasn’t born as while Finch dies inside Dwight’s body. There’s also Detective Kesler (Tim Thomerson), who he may or may not have hired to find out what is going on.

You can add might or might not to everything in this movie, as characters change motivations, friends become enemies, enemies become friends and it gets a lot Lost Highway and I say that not because this is indebted to that film but because I have no other handle to hang this on, a film that juxtaposes its lead character being devoured by a zombie while Tiffany Shepis is all flirty with him as she’s dressed for a funeral. And who is Shepis, the woman who visits him every day while he’s losing his mind in the hospital? Who is good? Who is bad? Is anyone?

Originally released in 2012 as Season of Darkness before being revised in 2017 as Asylum of Darkness, this was shot in Ohio and edited in Los Angeles. It feels like it came from the 1990s, where you would have found it two minutes before the video store closed and then tried to tell all your friends about it but couldn’t find a copy anywhere to prove that it was real. I feel the same way now as I’m watching it online, so that should give you an idea of just how singular this is.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

I’m ten minutes into this movie and I’ve already met the cybernetic Dr. Christopher Steele (Randal Malone), a krimi looking robot supervillain; giant rats attacking a spaceship; a rat worm its way into the crotch of heroine Sonia (Tasha Tacosa) and artillery being loaded out of a Space Steele Corporation AC-130 to blow a rocket out of the sky. Needless to say, I’m in love with this and it hasn’t even got started yet.

Jeff Leroy makes movies that feel like they were drawn in Spanish class by a bored 16 year old instead of paying attention. I’m talking stuff like Frankenstein in a Women’s Prison, Furious Road and Giantess Attack vs. Mecha Fembot.

Now, this movie is obviously made with miniatures and no budget — and all the CGI quality that implies — but it’s heart is worth a million blockbusters. I mean, this movie has a mysterious planet just showing up in our solar system and a woman being controlled by a super smart psychic rat that lives where her guts used to be. And this movie is in no way afraid of showing you just how disgusting that would be.

Why does Dr. Steele look like he does and have metal hands? “Probably a rocket explosion. Need to know basis.” This is how you do dialogue. Of course Sonia’s ex is Jake Walsh (Ford Austin), an ex-Special Forces guy who is willing to hide her even if she is bringing rats to destroy our world.

Speaking of giant rats, there was nearly a kaiju movie in the 60s that would have changed the scope of the genre. Giant Horde Beast Nezura was a movie that was directed by Mitsuo Murayama and produced by Daiei Film, but it was shut down by the health department because the brown rats being used for the rat swarm could transmit diseases. Daiei wasn’t put off making kaiju films and soon made Gamera.

Somehow, this movie combines Starship Troopers, Aliens, Rats: Night of Terror and every 1950s science gone wild movie along with special effects that go from “how did they do that?” to “that’s obviously a rat from PetSmart with CGI red eyes.” It also remembers that gore is so essential, so why not have a woman eat a man’s throat while blood sprays like the geyser of a Japanese samurai movie?

This is the kind of movie that demands to be watched with an audience, as it has stuff in it like a rat temple on Planet X; a Phantom of the Opera-like scene where we see Professor Steele’s face, Sonia shooting herself in the head and the rats refusing to let her die, so she wears a hat to cover the whole in her head; a drunk named Teddy exposing the rat in her head that uses its psychic powers to blow him into chunks; Jake cutting himself to feed her blood and that scene being shot as if its sexy and, of course, giant rats taking over most of America.

This ends on a cliffhanger and man, I wish Jeff Leroy made ten of these.

Directed by Natalie Erika James from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White and Skylar James, Apartment 7A has the roughest of battles to fight. Do we need a prequel to what may be the most perfect horror movie ever, Rosemary’s Baby? We’ve had a TV movie sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby and a 2014 miniseries remake. What does this have to bring to the table?

In my eyes, a lot.

After their 2010 A Nightmare On Elm Street was a critical failure, Platinum Dunes stopped making remakes and reimaginings for some time, other than restarting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films. Since the success of their A Quiet Place and The Purge movies, they’ve embraced sequels and films set within the universe of their properties.

Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) was just a short conversation and a death in the original, but here she’s a dancer who will seemingly do anything to be on Broadway, getting to be in Kiss Me, Kate before horribly breaking her ankle, an injury that she deals with via pills and determination. On another failed audition, she follows producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) home, becomes sick and is helped by Roman (Kevin McNally) and Minnie Castavet (Dianne Wiest). Over the next few days, she has a bad dream and wakes up on bed with Marchand, who tells her she got the part. Another nightmare leads to a neighbor named Lily giving her a salve that fixes her ankle, just days before Lily attacks her with scissors.

The Bramford is, as always, a strange place.

As you’d imagine, she’s soon pregnant and has the Castavets taking a special interest in her. Dr. Sapirstein seems too strange; a back alley abortion leads to the doctor having a seizure, you see where this is all going.

You’ve seen this part before. A party, where 1965 will be year one and God dies; Satan will be born. Except that — spoilers here — Terry dances to “Be My Baby” and sort of like The Pyx — exactly like? — she throws herself out the window, ending the child’s life before it can happen.

There’s a lot of fan service, but I think my wife may be the one person getting it all, like Minnie drinking a vodka blush or the Woodhouses walking through the police tape when the film ends. But after years of Blumhouse remakes angering her with how they play with the culture that she loves, she was wildly pleased with this film. Compared to the recent ‘Salem’s Lot, this feels practically worshipful. Wiest is great in her role.

Yes, we didn’t need a prequel to this film. But as I always say, when done well — or even just OK — films like this give us what we want most of all, more time in the worlds of the movies that we love the most.

Congo will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.

Frank Marshall is more known as a producer than a director. After all, he was in that role for movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, Back to the Future and so many more films, but he didn’t direct until 1990’s Arachnophobia. He also helmed Alive and Eight Below, as well as this film. Again — he’s much better known as a producer, as he’s since executive produced the Jason Bourne and Jurassic Park films.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, a Michael Crichton novel also inspired this film, which had a long history before it finally played cinemas.

After the success of The First Great Train Robbery, Crichton wanted to write a movie for Sean Connery, as the character of Charles Munro, who he saw as an analog to Allan Quatermain. Ironically, that’s the character that Connery would play in his final screen role in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Crichton pitched the idea to producer Frank Yablans — the same guy who brought us The Fury, Mommie Dearest and Kidco — who liked the idea so much that he — without Crichton’s authorization thank you very much — sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, a year before the book was published.

Once Crichton learned that he could not use a real gorilla to portray the character of Amy, he left the project. The film was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter before years later, Marshall came on board. That all came to pass because, during the making of Jurassic Park, Crichton was impressed with Stan Winston’s work. Producer Kathleen Kennedy suggested that Winston could make the apes for Congo, talked to her husband — yep, Frank Marshall — about the project and Yablans came back on board again.

However, the final film is only loosely based on the Crichton script, with John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) taking over the writing duties.

While testing a communications laser in the Congo, TraviCom employees Charles Travis (Bruce Campbell!) and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city. However, it looks like everyone dies as the company watches the exploration via satellite by Karen Ross (Laura Linney), a former CIA operative and also the former fiancee of Travis, whose dad R.B. (Joe Don Baker!) owns the company. Man, talk about run-on sentences.

There’s also primatologist Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), who has a mountain gorilla named Amy, who can speak via a special glove that translates sign language to audio. She’s been drawing jungles and intricate gems, which means that Peter thinks she should go back home to Africa. He funds that trip via Karen and TraviCom, as well as Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).

They’re led by the greatest hunter of all time, Captain Monroe Kelly. You know what they always say: if you can’t get Sean Connery, get Ernie Hudson. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — Killer Kroc from Suicide Squad — shows up as Munro’s second-in-command Kahega. And hey — there’s Joe Pantoliano as another merc! And John Hawkes (Eastbound & Down) is also here, as well as Delroy Lindo and Kevin Grevioux from the Underworld movies.

Between native tribes, gorillas being used to guard diamond mines and Tim Curry getting killed by a pack of those gorillas — not to mention a subplot that has Dr. Elliot upset when Amy ends up getting rawdogged (rawaped?) by a silverback and leaving humanity for the jungle, this movie literally looks like studio notes on film. There’s everything for somebody, I guess. Curry and Hudson are having a blast, however. Hudson is almost in a totally different movie than anyone else and has called out Congo as the best time he ever had making a movie. It shows.

1990’s kids had Kenner on hand to help them recreate the story of the Lost City of Zinj with Congo action figures. You could grab Peter, Karen, Kahega, Peter and Amy for the good guys — well, I guess protagonists, maybe, but who wants to tell kids that they are protagonists versus good guys? And then for the apes, you have Blastface, Mangler, Zinj Apes and the deluxe Bonecrusher. There were also two vehicles, the Net Trap and Trail Hacker. They fit into the Kenner aesthetic, just like their RoboCop and Jurassic Park figures. Seriously, Kenner made figures for every movie it seemed like — they made Waterworld figures, after all!

Speaking of Jurassic Park, my feeling on this movie has been that everyone wanted to will another series of films much like Crichton’s novel into existence. This whole thing was vaporware, based on a story that the author never really finished made by people who didn’t have any real concern with the source material, which never really existed in the first place. Millions were dumped into it and it actually did pretty well — $152 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — but no one really remembers it.

All they do remember is that there was a scene where one of the Zinj gorillas uses a laser. That scene doesn’t exist in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering it in a Mandela Effect moment.

Blood Tracks will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.

Imagine The Hills Have Eyes, but in a skiing lodge, with a hair metal band.

It stars Easy Action, the first Swedish band to ever get a worldwide record deal, which is a fact on their Wikipedia page that kind of smells fishy. Abba?

The band split up in 1986, a year after this effort, when guitarist and band leader Kee Marcello quit the band to join Europe. That band went on to sell 30 million albums, so he did pretty well. Singer Zinny J. Zan went on to join the band Kingpin, which you would know better by their later name, Shotgun Messiah.

American hair band Poison used the chorus of Easy Action’s 1983 single “We Go Rocking” in their song “I Want Action,” which led to a lawsuit that the Swedish band won.

The original lineup just played their hit album That Makes One at the Sweden Rock Festival. That makes me happy.

There’s a whole bunch of mayhem, hairspray and murder in this movie, including people getting their eyes eaten, axes to the head and impalings. It’s pretty grisly, which is great, because it juxtaposes the ridiculous antics of this band and its groupies trying to make a movie in the snow.

The best part of all of this is that Easy Action were all afraid to act, so director Mats Helge Olsson got them drunk. You can tell — they’re destroyed for most of the movie. I advise that you’re in the same condition when you watch this.