EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Amityville Ripper starts with a news segment of people hating Amityville movies, the original house being burned down, an auction of items that were in the house, multiple UFO abductions, the Spider podcast, a commercial for Alien Mingle and another for Steve Martin’s (not that one) Video Store. At some point, I was wondering if this was using Pond 5 footage like every other Amityville movie and just trying to pad a runtime with all of this footage, but then as the movie went on, surprise, this actually gets why I watch these movies.

Not just because a demon cursed me to watch all of them and would ruin our web traffic if I stopped.

This takes place in 2000 — the Y2K bug is a thing — and Marianne (Kelsey Ann Baker) and her brother — or step-brother — Nichols (Hunter Redfern) wake up to their parents going away on vacation for New Year’s Eve. Marianne — known as M — had something big planned with her best friend Annie (Angel Nichole Bradford). And no, not lesbian stuff, as her brother and his wheelchair bound friend Chapman (Ryan Martel). Instead, she has had the knife of Jack the Ripper sent to her from that auction. And her friend Tony, who is now in Hollywood, said it’s real because “he lived that Ripper lifestyle.”

What is a Ripper lifestyle?

Also, Marianne has dreams of slow jams playing over stock footage of a jet ski, which makes her even more endearing to me and not just because she’s a goth girl with shaved sides of her hair and looks a lot like Rainbow Harvest. She also mentions that she really wanted the clock from the house, but an architect — Jacob Sterling, right? — got it first.

While everyone — including way too nice cheerleader Liz (Anna Clary) — is partying and playing Sugar Ray, Marianne and Annie go up to her room and have a seance with a Ouija board, some tarot cards, Jack the Ripper’s knife and plenty of candles. Also: If M is so goth, why is she wearing an N’Sync shirt when the rest of her room is full of Universal Monsters pillows, a black metal poster and a Killer Klowns poster? At least her closest is all full of black shirts.

Director and writer Bobby Canipe Jr. has obliterated the fourth wall in this movie, as the characters even find the script, not that it keeps all of them alive. Just look at the dialogue:

Annie: Everything that happened in the Amityville house was true. And can you just imagine if this knife of Jack the Ripper’s became imbued with the power of the Amityville house? It’d be like we had some sort of Amityville ripper on our hands.

Marianne: True, but I think that’s kind of the point. I’m pretty sure that the name of this movie is Amityville Ripper.

Then The Ripper (Josh Allman) comes to life, wearing a Dracula costume, and also aliens.

There’s a line that sums up this entire movie, as well as all Amityville sequels.

“Brother, it’s an Amityville sequel. Shit’s different here.”

Not all the humor hits perfectly, but who cares? This is way better than nearly any other Amityville sequel, which isn’t saying much, but it does try. Which is, again, way more than almost every other sequel not made in Canada or by an Italian director.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Spattered Bride was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 10, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, November 15, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, September 17, 1983 at 3:00 a.m.

La novia ensangrentada is based on Carmilla, that tale of forbidden Sapphic vampire love. Released as a double feature in the U.S. with I Dismember Mama, it even had a special trailer that had an audience member losing their marbles.

Susan (Maribel Martín) is so newlywed that she shows up on her honeymoon still wearing her gown. She’s being followed by Mircala Karstein (Alexandra Bastedo) and has waking terrors, imagining a man has come into her room to assault her. When she visits her the house where her husband (Simón Andreu) was raised, she finds paintings of all the men, but no women save Karstein, who murdered her husband on their wedding night after he forced her to commit unspeakable acts.

As her dreams are taken over by Karstein, her husband finds a woman buried on the beach. She’s still alive — well, she’s undead — and she’s Karstein in human form, seducing Susan in dreams of deadly daggers and in waking caresses. By the end, he must destroy them while they sleep intertwined in a coffin and then fulfill the wish of her thrall to shoot her in the head.

Sure, it’s a lot like The Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness, but those movies don’t have their protagonist’s sexual awakening come complete with remembering that her husband uses her for sex whenever he wants it without pleasure for her, so she blows another man’s balls clean off with a shotgun.

“The good ones are those who are content to dream what the wicked actually practice.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gorilla at Large was on Chiller Theater on Friday, July 6, 1982 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, August 28, 1982 at 2:00 a.m. in 3D.

Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin and Warren Stevens. What a cast! Throw in George Barrows as Goliath, the titular gorilla and man, we have a movie. Wait — it’s in 3D? How much do you want to give us, Panoramic Productions?

The carnival has come to town and its big selling point is watching the giant gorilla Goliath get cock teased by Laverne, a trapeze artist (Bancroft). Yet the owner, Cyrus Miller (Burr) thinks the act is growing old. So carnival barker Joey (Cameron Mitchell) puts on a gorilla costume and they change it up, with a new ending where the beast really does get the girl. This upsets Goliath’s trainer Kovacs (Peter Whitney) and Joey’s fiance Audrey (Charlotte Austin), who doesn’t want him near another woman.

Of course, murders ensue, a hall of mirrors and a rollercoaster make for amazing set pieces and the ending is a genuine surprise. When this aired on TV in the 80s, the giveaway glasses smelled like bananas, which is what I want all movies to have the whiff of.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Room was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 24, 1966 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, November 4, 1967 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, March 28, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.

Directed by Roy William Neill  — who gets mystery, after all, he directed eleven of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes films as well as early noir like Black Angel — and written by Arthur Strawn and Henry Myers, The Black Room has a prophecy at its center: at some point, the younger brother of the de Berghmann family is cursed to kill his elder in the Black Room of the castle. Hmm — seems like something that would show up nearly forty years later in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.

Boris Karloff seems to be having the time of his life in this movie, playing the dual role of the kindly Anton de Berghmann and his depraved brother Baron Gregor de Berghmann, who is about as blasphemous as the Hayes Code would allow. After all, he’s known for randomly killing the wives of the simple folk that make up his people.

When servant girl Mashka (Katherine DeMille) disappears, the people have had enough and take their pitchforks and torches to the castle. The Baron claims that he will be leaving forever, giving the kingdom to his more genial and popular brother. As they sign the papers in secret, the Baron leads Anton to his Black Room. By that, I mean he drops him like thirty feet into it and before Anton dies, he sees the dead body of Mashka and plenty more women.

Now, the Baron acts as Anton — even pretending only one of his arms works — and manipulates Thea (Marian Marsh), the daughter of family advisor Colonel Hassell (who also gets killed), into marrying him instead of her true love Lt. Albert Lussan (Robert Allen), who is jailed. Just when there’s no hope, Anton’s dog interrupts the wedding and basically shoves the man who killed his master into the pit that is the Black Room as the Baron is impaled on a knife held in his dead brother’s hand, fulfilling the prophecy.

This was shown often on TV as it was part of the Son of Shock package, along with Before I Hang, Behind the Mask, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Face Behind the Mask, Island of Doomed Men, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man Who Lived Twice, The Man With Nine Lives, Night of Terror, The Devil Commands, Black Friday, The Bride of Frankenstein, Captive Wild Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, The Jungle Captive, The Mummy’s Curse and The Soul of a Monster.

It’s a really fun — and fast moving — movie with a huge cast of extras, making it seem like a way bigger movie than it really is.

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971): Five years after Africa Blood and Guts, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi returned with this movie, which is pretty much one of the roughest films I’ve ever made it through.

This was shot primarily in Haiti, where the directors were the guests of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, who gave them diplomatic cars, clearance to film anywhere on the island and as many extras as they required to be used as slaves being treated exactly as slaves were. They were also invited to a nightly dinner with Duvalier himself.

If your mind isn’t already blown, stick around.

Goodbye Uncle Tom is based on true events in which the filmmakers explore America in slavery times, using published documents and materials from the public record to make what they consider a documentary, even claiming to go back in time to achieve this level of realism.

This movie was made in opposition to the claims that Africa Blood and Guts was racist. It didn’t work, as Roger Ebert would say, “They have finally done it: Made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary.” He also stated that “This movie itself humiliates its actors in the way the slaves were humiliated 200 years ago.”

The movie was originally released in Italy in a 119-minute version and was immediately withdrawn. I’ve read that the directors were sued for plagiarism by writer Joseph Chamberlain Furnas. It was then re-released with 17 more minutes of footage.

The director’s cut shows a comparison between the horrors of slavery and the rise of the Black Power Movement, ending with an unidentified black man’s fantasy of living out William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. In that book, Turned is divinely inspired and given a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race.

This ending upset American distributors so much that they forced Jacopetti and Prosperi to cut more than thirteen minutes of racial politics that would upset their audiences. Pauline Kael still said that the movie was “the most specific and rabid incitement to race war,” a view shared with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who said that Goodbye Uncle Tom was a Jewish conspiracy to incite blacks on white violence.

This movie is not for everyone. But I feel that it needs to be seen. I rarely get political on this site, but in truth, I feel that we as a country have not done enough to understand the roots of the black experience. While an Italian exploitation film isn’t the best way to learn more, it’s a start.

It’s no accident that Cannibal Holocaust would eventually use the music of Riz Ortolani to juxtapose the horrific images on screen with the beauty of his compositions. The composer had been working with the duo since Mondo Cane, where his song “More” nearly won an Oscar.

But make no mistake that this movie, while intending to be educational and anti-racist, still employs the tools of the mondo and exploitation. How else do you describe the conceit that these filmmakers have gone back in time, taking a helicopter with them that they use to fly away from the terrors of the plantation at the end?

In 2010, Dr. David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, said that when he showed this film to a class, it led to some major traumas. “On the day that we watched Goodbye Uncle Tom three students had unexcused absences, several cried while watching, one almost vomited; most sat, sad and disgusted. I taught for another fifteen years but I never showed that movie again.”

He went on to say that the film “is a more truthful portrayal of the brutality and obscenity of slave life than was Roots; however, I have some major problems with the film. I find it ironic that a movie that explored the exploitation and degradation of Black people was filmed in a way that exploited and degraded Black people. In some ways Goodbye Uncle Tom was just a XXX movie set against the backdrop of slavery; the “peculiar institution” served as an excuse to show sexual and violent gore. Jacopetti and Prosperi told a great many painful truths about slavery but they debased hundreds of Blacks to make the film.”

“I said all of that to say this: Jacopetti and Prosperi were not the messengers that I would have selected, and their implied assumptions about Blacks are troubling, but they made a movie that accurately portrayed the horrors of slavery. Of course, it is the case that a realistic depiction of the savagery of slavery would be difficult to watch no matter who made it. This is why when you finish watching Roots you may feel that a family has overcome great oppression and a nation has become more democratic; whereas when you finish watching Goodbye Uncle Tom you just feel sick to your stomach.”

That says a lot about this movie in a better way than I can, but I’m still going to try to sum it up: this is a well-made movie that may have been made with the best of intentions, but was made by two people who only had the experience to make exactly what they made. It is a movie made about slavery that used slave labor. It is a movie that offended both liberals and conservatives, those that believed in tolerance and those that were racist, those that were black and people who were white. This is a message movie that had its message taken away by American producers, leaving two hours of shock with none of the moral it so desperately needed.

If this movie upsets you, perhaps you needed to be upset. You should be less upset about a movie made nearly fifty years ago and more upset about our nation’s history of racism and intolerance. And you should definitely be upset about the lack of civil rights in our country today, which no matter who is President continually must face challenges.

The Importance of Shocking: Gualtiero Jacopetti (2009): Included with the Goodbye Uncle Tom 4K set, this documentary by Andrea Bettinetti attempts to tell the story behind the man who made Mondo Cane.

Beyond the behind the scenes footage of the mondo films being created, this documentary gets into the journalism career of Jacopetti, which includes a scandal as the paper he worked for, Cronache, published photos so scandalous of Sophia Loren that he earned a one-year jail sentence. What I did not know was how influential his work on newsreels were, which went away from just reporting the news and expanded to cynically comment on events.

According to “Jacopetti’s Sexual Celebrity” by Dalila Missero, “Jacopetti was a famous journalist who was involved in a series of sex scandals, including episodes of paedophilia, prostitution and rape, which had made him a much discussed figure in the Italian media and entertainment system for almost a decade. ” The film does not shy away from this, as it explains how he had to marry a gypsy girl for some time before the marriage was annulled to escape from one of these charges.

This also goes deep into the 1961 car crash that claimed the life of his girlfriend, Belinda Lee, who Jacopetti was buried next a half century later. Beyond having compound fractures, his depression was so deep that American doctors were treating him with a cocktail of drugs that would stun several people.

He’s just as complicated as the films that he made. Hard to defend, yet also someone whose work has merit; if it were simple documentary and not exploitation, it would be celebrated. Yet the mondo genre is born in the gutter, even if it inspired today’s media. I walked away from this still unsure how I felt about Jacopetti, just like how I always feel strange watching his films. Beyond normal sleaze, you feel complicit in them as a viewer, as if you are condoning the ways in which they were made and the moments that they capture.

The Godfathers of Mondo (2003): Directed by David Gregory, this documentary attempts to explain not only the appeal of mondo and the films of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, but whether or not they were guilty of war crimes as they filmed their mondo films.

Originally part of Blue Underground’s Mondo Cane Collection, this makes a welcome return on their Goodbye Uncle Tom release. This film may reveal that Carlo Rambaldi was hired to create the burning monk in Mondo Cane 2, yet the subjects are more guarded when having to discuss the atrocities they captured on film. These things, they claim, would still happen if they shot them or not. This is not what unguilty people say.

The strongest part of this film is that Jacopetti and Prosperi were still alive to tell their stories. Shot on their own, they each have a point of view of why they did what they did and how they were intending much of their work to be a condemnation of what they were capturing. Often, the humor and commentary was lost, particularly in America, where these things were edited from their movies. Yet the mondo is based on danger and shocking people, so you have to expect them to be controversial. That said, it seemed like these filmmakers went further every time, all the way to Goodbye Uncle Tom, a movie filmed with slaves of modern times to decry slaves of the past, where Jacopetti and Prosperi take a time traveling helicopter to the American South and reenact the horrors of slavery while wallowing in it.

I wish this had gotten more into Mondo Candido and what the duo did afterward, but this is such a rich document that it’s hard to say anything negative. Just hearing Ortolani talk about these films is something I never thought that I would hear.

The Blue Underground 4K UHD release of Goodbye Uncle Tom has both the Italian and English versions of this movie, as well as the two documentaries discussed above. It also has interviews with Jacopetti, Prosperi and Ortolani, behind the scenes photos and footage, interviews with author Mark Goodall and Professor Matthew J. Smith, the soundtrack to this movie and a collectible booklet with new essay by Dan Madigan. You can get this from MVD.