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.

First off — this movie was directed Sam Firstenberg. Yes, the same person who directed Revenge of the Ninja, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Ninja 3: The Domination, Riverbend, American Ninja, American Ninja 2, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, American Samurai and so many more amazing films.

What’s wild is that it was written by Samuel Oldham (who edited Cards of Death) and Edward D. Wood Jr.

Yes, that Ed Wood.

Supposedly, there is footage in this of an uncompleted Wood film, Amazon Women from Space, and it’s worked into new things that Firstenberg shot.

On Firstenberg’s old web site, he said the following:

“One day I got a phone call from my friend, scriptwriter Sam Oldham. The excitement and urgency in his voice told me something was up. I felt right away that this call was going to change things for me. And I was right.

Sam is a devoted, if not fanatic, fan of old sci-fi flicks. VHS, DVD, posters, props, magazines, websites, you name it, he loves it. Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Queen of Outer Space, The Creeping Terror — these are the kinds of movies he lives for. When he called me, he was working at one of the small, dingy, forgotten film vaults that exist all over Hollywood. His job was to check the condition of old negatives and prints stored in rusting tin cans, to see if any were worth saving, and catalog them.

You all know of Ed Wood, director of the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, the man who was crowned the worst director of all time, and immortalized in Tim Burton’s movie. Many people are devoted to his work; he is probably the original cult director, and his name is connected to quite a few tacky Hollywood projects. But for many years, rumors have circulated in Hollywood about one last project Ed Wood started but never finished. He either ran out of money or died before it was finished, depending on who tells the story. Ed Wood was so strange that it is not unlikely that such a film, or part of a film, really exists. The supposed title of the lost film was Amazon Women From Outer Space,  definitely a typical Ed Wood title. No one has come up with any evidence to authenticate the rumors, but nevertheless, they keep resurfacing. Not long ago, however, a lost and forgotten Ed Wood script was found and produced — so you see, miracles can sometimes happen. You can imagine the excitement that would be stirred up if any “lost” Ed Wood footage were discovered today.”

Later, he reveals what was found in those vaults.

“He tells me he’s found some reels of celluloid tucked away on a hard-to-reach, cobweb-covered shelf. After running the film through the viewer, he now strongly believes that he has discovered the lost Amazon Women From Outer Space. “And that’s not all!” he says. “There are script pages too, ten or fifteen of them! They were in a paper bag underneath the film cans! This is impossible, but I’ve got it all right here!” He sounded like he was about to leap right through the phone line. “Yeah, right,” I said. I am notoriously skeptical when it comes to sensational information. On the other hand, Sam’s knowledge of sci-fi films is vast. He can recite 20-minute passages from any old horror or sci-fi flick, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was after midnight, but Sam asked me to come down and look at the footage. I found myself twenty minutes later in a pitch-dark, rat-infested alley off Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, knocking at the back door, and soon we were hunched over the viewer, watching the moving images on the small square glass. I am not an expert on old sci-fi flicks, nor on Ed Wood’s filmography, but it struck me immediately that my friend might be right. The yards and yards of unedited material we viewed were so tacky, so ridiculous, and so incoherent, that they definitely had the Ed Wood touch. The footage was full of Amazon-type women running around in skimpy outfits on cheap spaceship sets. But the cans and boxes were not labeled, and the scenes were not slated, so there was no way to determine whether Sam was right. None of the actresses was even remotely familiar either. And the script pages he mentioned? I turned them over in my hands, fearful that they would crumble to dust right then and there. They seemed to correspond to the film images. We knew we had to contact experts in the area immediately, to help us authenticate, recover, and maybe even restore the remnants of the historic Amazon Women From Outer Space.”

Professor Harvey Kirk (David Rabius, who was also in The Girlfriend from Outer Space, which he probably brought up when he auditioned) is a sex addict whose marriage to Barbara (Barbara Sharp, who also produced this and another Oldham-directed movie, Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy: Fallen Idol) is almost finished. She’s trying to set him up by having her friends come on to him and beyond that, he’s being watched by alien women — several are his students — and then they take him to their planet and start using him to populate the race as otherwise, all they will have is more women.

Michael Dorn — Worf! — is a bartender. Once, I saw him at a convention and someone asked him what he liked about being on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He answered that he was happy that he wasn’t playing a cop after a career of playing police officers like Officer Jebediah Turner on CHiPS. The person asking said, “Worf is a security officer, so you’re still a cop.” He was so sad that he just walked off the stage.

The Amazons in this movie are played by Valentina Chepiga, Elise Muller (who was also in Beach Babes from Beyond), Sherry Goggin (an American Gladiators contestant), Jayne Trcka (she’s the most Amazonian of the Amazons in this), Lauren Powers (well, she’s also pretty big), Cynthia Bridges, Brenda Kelly (who is also in another Oldham movie, Close Encounters of the 4th Kind: Infestation from Mars), Timea Majorova (who was in the movie Bigger, Faster. Stronger with Powers), Nicole Rollolazo, Viviana Soldana, Andrulla Blanchette (her IMDB background says that she is the most successful  female British bodybuilder in the world and the only British bodybuilder to win the Ms. Olympia), Elaine Goodlad, Kat Meyers, Gayle Moher and Lena Johanessen.

Back to that Wood footage. Is it real?

Firstenberg said, “The next few weeks were devoted to running the material by authorities on Ed Wood — film historians, directors, sci-fi buffs, and the hard-core sci-fi B-movie geek crowd. This process proved to be an emotional roller coaster for us, and by the end of it, we felt as if we’d been turned inside-out.  As soon as one expert supported the Ed Wood theory, another would dismiss it as preposterous. Sam and I were nervous wrecks.  Did we have something, or didn’t we?

One of the people we approached was a hard-core sci-fi fan, Dr. Elliott Haimoff, Ph.D. A documentary producer, Elliott was so excited when he heard about our discovery, he immediately insisted on joining us on our mission. We decided that the evidence strongly suggested that the footage was, indeed, Ed Wood material, and as a trio of producer, director, and writer, we resolved to rescue and restore the treasure we had found.”

Later, he specifically refers to the footage by saying, “We had our Ed Wood-type movie — the most hideous, ridiculous, campy, tacky sci-fi we ever saw.  It was one ugly baby, worse than Plan 9 — and we were in love with it. The plan was to give it the right exposure, bring it out to the public so the sci-fi crowd could judge it for themselves. But the product was too short, at 62 minutes, and it had no beginning and no end. It was clear that this movie, which we now officially called Amazon Women From Outer Space, was never completed. As exciting as it was, we all felt unsatisfied. Discussing and debating our predicament, we made the decision to go the extra mile and attempt to extend and complete Amazon Women into a 90-minute full feature, with a beginning, middle, and end. It was too good to neglect. Having in our group a writer, a producer, an editor, and myself a director, we were confident that we could pull it off. Sam Oldham bashed out a script utilizing the original pages, first off.  In the revamped story, the Amazon women from outer space realize they need a male in order to ensure the survival of their species, and find the ideal mate on Earth. They kidnap their chosen male, and the story is off and running. With the male at the center of the new script, the title of the new movie became The Interplanetary Surplus Male and the Amazon Women of Outer Space.”

The film seemingly had major issues with the financial backer, as Firstenberg went on to say that they had no money and “the entire cast and crew stayed on and worked for deferred payment in order to complete the 18-day shoot. Miraculously the filming was completed to my satisfaction, using credit cards and other funds our producer scraped together.”

What they had didn’t match, so more reshoots happened — Firstenberg paying for it all, saying, “I’m looking at my wallet, which seems to be getting skinnier and skinnier!” — and there was a plan to “digitally isolate and colorize some of the backgrounds from the old footage, and composite the actors onto the backgrounds.”

In conclusion, Firstenberg said that he was “Maybe I am now a co-director with Ed Wood on a movie, maybe with someone else. In any event, we ended up with a very funny, very campy, very authentic 50’s-style sci-fi spoof. You will not find any continuity or sanity in it, but when you see it, you will be able to experience our sci-fi discovery.”

There was also an official site that is down now, but you can see it thanks to the Internet Archive. One of the anecdotes on the site says, “As for the rumors regarding the connection with Ed Wood and his lost footage……… “No Comment” at this time.”

Regardless, what emerged is a movie that fits into the SOV era in look. In fact, there are scenes where the director speaks to the actors and it feels like everyone is breaking the fourth wall. Or maybe they didn’t feel like editing it. I’d love to talk to Firstenberg about how this was made.

There are negative reviews of this movie online but I found moments of it fascinating. There are several Star Wars references that are explained by the Amazons that at one point, one of them left their planet and went to Earth because she was in love with a human — Queen of Outer Space — and sold all their secrets to Hollywood. In fact, they say that Star Wars was shot on location and that they have been working with Earth’s governments and filmmakers for years so that they can have breeding stock in exchange for technology.

What a strange and wonderful movie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Christopher Wilcha’s fast-paced documentary Flipside should hit home with anyone who has ever been involved in any type of creative work, from filmmaking to writing to any other type of art. In Flipside, he takes into stock a wide variety of projects that meant a lot to him that he never had the chance to finish, for a variety of reasons.

A film about Wilcha’s personal life as much as his professional one(s), Flipside takes viewers on a journey from the director’s subversive first full-time job working for Columbia House, during which he made his first documentary, the well-received The Target Shoots First (2000). Although it seemed like a career in documentary filmmaking was in the offing, life, as it does, got in the way, including a marriage and children leading to needing steady payment. Wilcha once again found himself working in advertising, filming commercials when not working on projects that never seemed to get finished.

A main focus of Flipside is Wilcha’s second attempt at trying to help Flipside Record Store in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey — where he worked as a high-schooler — survive in a world that has passed the shop and its owner Dan Dondiego by. Refusing to take Flipside online in any form nor to organize the cluttered business — along with facing new competition from a tightly run store nearby — Dondiego’s plight causes Wilcha to reassess his own inability to let go of the past.

Flipside incorporates footage from some of Wilcha’s unfinished projects, including a profile of the late jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who knew he was dying at the time, and a document of Starlee Kine’s attempt to get over writer’s block to work on a book. Coeditors Claire Ave’Lallemant and Joe Beshenkovsky work some serious magic as they take Flipside viewers on a brisk, back-and-forth ride through Wilcha’s life.

There’s much more to Wilcha’s story, and I’ll leave that for viewers to experience for themselves. It’s a highly relatable one to me, and I’m sure to many others, as well. Flipside will put a few lumps in your throat, some smiles on your face, and some existential questions about your own life in your mind. 

Flipside screens as part of the 2024 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 18–28. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.

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.

Shot on Super 8, this film tells the story of how PR exec Jim Matthews (David Rommel) tries to leave his wife, genetic designer Meredith Weaver (Anna Zizzo) for his secretary Jenny Dole (Joan Dinco). His wife doses him with her latest experiment, which causes his extremities that start thinking on their own and destroying his mind. Yes, his hands, his arms, his legs, even his cock all can move away from his body to kill and feed, kind of like a demented version of the Myron Fass Captain Marvel that split. into different parts.

Directed and written by Tom Berna (his only film, however he has acted and provided special effects for several others), Colony Mutation has great acting from Rommel and the relationship between Meredith and her sister Suzanne (Susan L. Cane) feels authentic. How strange that a body horror film is mostly about the human emotions of a marriage being destroyed and a woman falling in love with a man who is already taken.

That said, it’s as dark as dark gets and the special effects are the result of the beyond microbudget. But who cares when the idea is this good? Where else would you get a movie with a killer penis and a man who no longer can control his body because he couldn’t control his body? Milwaukee, Wisconsin was far from Hollywood and films made like this are the last bastion of what regional filmmaking was, grimy and rough blasts of unreality that infect our brains.

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.

When I spoke to Bret McCormick, I had not seen this movie yet and wanted to know more.

B&S: You’ve also made some docs, like Children of Dracula, which seems ahead of its time now in shining a light on a culture some would see as aberrant. What was that process like?

BRET: We ran ads in an alternative newspaper in Dallas and one in LA and then screened through the respondents. It was a very quick production. I was very glad Joe Estevez agreed to narrate. I didn’t take it very seriously at the time.

I’m so glad that Visual Vengeance has released it to streaming.

“Are you a Vampire? Vampire’s victim? Have fantasies about Vampires?” That’s the ad circulated in major Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and got hundreds of responses. After all, Interview With a Vampire had come out that year.

Directed by McCormick and Christopher Romero, this has a series of people who explain how they either became fascinated by vampires or became one. Well, one lady can only make raw bacon and eat it which doesn’t seem to be the kind of life that we were promised by the Hammer films, but what can you do?

One of the people who shows up in this is Tony Brownrigg, the son of S.F. Brownrigg and Libby Hall. He’s acted in quite a few films and made a sequel to one of his father’s films with Don’t Look In the Basement 2.

There are also trailers spaced throughout that include The Twilight People, Andy Warhol’s Dracula and The Velvet Vampire, which are all beyond great picks if you want some different views of how movies deal with vampirism.

In the days before basic cable becoming, well, a lot like this movie, these are the films that you’d find in the horror section of your mom and pop rental store but they may not have had a true home. Most of those shops didn’t have a documentary section. I would have totally rented this and yes, made a copy of it, and made people watch it and laughed when they thought I was strange because I had memorized so many of the interviews.

You can watch this on Tubi.