Producer Herman Cohen was inspired by reading a series of newspaper articles about Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. He got to visit the museum and wrote this with Aben Kandel. Many of the weapons in this — including the binoculars — were based on actual weapons of murder.

Cohen wanted Vincent Price or Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated pushed for a British actor, so Michael Gough is the main bad guy, Edmond Bancroft. Working with his assistant Rick (Graham Curnow), he’s creating a black museum of his own filled with things that have killed people. He also writes about them in the paper and in books. He’s so known for this that a shop owner (Beatrice Varley) keeps weapons that she gets just for him.

There’s also a serial killer who is murdering people with other strange weapons and every time it happens, Bancroft goes mad and his blood pressure goes to 200/100, which let me tell you as someone who is oCD about testing and retesting my blood pressure would kill you.

Bancroft fights with his lover Joan (June Cunningham), who laughs at him and calls him a cripple. She goes out by herself, gets soused and hits on every man she sees before coming home to have a strange looking man place a guillotine on her bed and chop her head off.

As all that is happening, Rick falls for Angela (Shirley Anne Field) and starts planning to get married. However, he is tied to the crime writer by a dark secret.

Making this even better is the opening, which has hypnotist Emile Franchele and HypnoVista. This was added in the U.S. by American-International Pictures. I don’t know if I could be more excited to watch a movie after the opening.

Directed by Arthur Crabtree, this is a movie that was called “lurid,” “nasty” and “sensationalism without subtlety of characterization, situation or dialog.” Those people were right, right and very wrong.

The VCI blu ray of Horrors of the Black Museum has archival commentary by Cohen, a 2023 commentary by  Robert Kelly — who also created the new artwork for the cover, a tribute to Cohen and the original U.S. HypnoVista opening featuring psychologist, Emile Franchel. You can get this from MVD.

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.

Newspaper photographer Jeff Rhodes (Thom Meyers) has found that the people of a small Texas town are all drained of all of their blood. He’s on a deadline — Uncle Joe (Robert Bradeen) and Aunt Kate (Billie Keller) demand that he quit his job and come back to the family farm — while his brother Ralph (played by director and writer Roger Coburn) is a successful scientist at Research City. He also knows that alien life forms have come to Earth to bring dead bodies back to life and seek blood. If Jeff can stop the bedroom rodeo with Julie (Laura Ellis) he just might save the world if General Sanders (Dennis Letts) doesn’t nuke everyone first.

Bloodsuckers from Outer Space is aware that it’s a bad movie and leans into it, yet in the scenes where the aliens describe being dead and how Jeff will soon join them, the dialogue is actually pretty incredible. If only it went that way and became a Texas-based Messiah of Evil.

After running for President every year between 1968 and 1996, Pat Paulsen gets to be the leader of the United States in this movie and like almost everyone else, he’s busier having sex than doing something.

This had its first showing at Joe Bob Briggs’ 3rd Annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Custom Car Rally in 1984 — Paulsen was chaffed by how bad it looked — and even came out on VHS by a major company, Karl-Lorimar Home Video.

Coburn was also one of the directors of Tabloid.

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.

After Hurricane Xiora, the empowered Florida militia shoots a looter who has run into the swamps after he kills two of their men. Sergeant Barnes (Todd Terry) shoots him and learns that he was stealing diapers and baby food, just in time for the man’s voodoo grandmother (Yvone Williamson) to snap his neck.

Lieutenant Hutchinson (J. Todd Smith) and his unit are sent to find Barnes. He’s conflicted, as he joined to honor the memory of his father, who died in Desert Storm. He’s also not so sure that as a black man he should be ordering white men to shoot black people no matter what they’re doing.

Joined by weather reporter Lisa Hicks (Karin Justman) — yes, that happens in this movie — the unit finds two survivors who just so happens to be voodoo slaves to the grandmother.

Directed and written by Bob Cook (Rock-A-Die Baby, Animals), this has people wandering a swamp for most of the movie and delivers its one zombie quite late in the film. My favorite character was Corporal Dani Stevens (Debra Cassano), who ends up tongue kissing one of the privates by force in the bar and laughing at him. She got kicked out of the Marines for attacking her commander and is only in the militia to make her dad happy. Cassano is really good in the part and stands out.

This has an interesting anti-military, pro-looting message that you may not expect and some nice scenery. If you aren’t into movies where people wander aimlessly — I am kind of comforted by it — you will probably not enjoy yourself.

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.

Rudd (James Michael Taylor) is a rich guy who wants to use his Kronos Project to explore time. He has an actual time machine designed by Dr. Carrington (Jeffrey Combs) and a team ready to go into the time stream and be part of the Civil War and battle dinosaurs and even a Dinoman.

The dinosaurs all come from Planet of Dinosaurs, the Dinoman seems to have the same head as Repligator, the story feels like the Bruce Jones and Richard Corben comic Rip in Time, a train crash that comes out of Horror Express and a feel that is very 70s live action Saturday morning but then there are very adult explorations of the impact of time travel.

Some people are going to see the quality of the acting and the budget and instantly start judging these movies. Maybe they should watch more of Bret McCormick’s movies. This feels like an entire bunch of movies all smashed together into one film and we’re all the better for it.

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.

Directed and written by Steve Sessions (Contagio), Aberrations was made for “the cost of an average funeral.” It’s all based around a connecting story where horror novelist Claire Huston (Dawn Duvurger) uses a Ouija board — adding this to my Letterboxd list — to steal ideas from beyond the veil of the choir invisible from a dead master of terror. That means we get four stories, like Alice (Mona Duvera) dealing with a ventriloquist doll, Bobby (Amber Peach) being watched, a killer (Eric Spudic) geocaching to kill someone (Krystal Stevenson Akin) and grave robbers (Denman Powers, Kirk Jordan) bringing a man (J.C. Pennylegion) his dead wife.

The one skeleton at the end of the trailer looks just like one from Creepshow and that seems intentional. I also like that when it says “four tales of the macabre,” it’s over one of the actresses’ rear ends in a shower and that proves that what sells a horror movie will never change.

This got released before the current run of films like this that are not really connected and are just shorts all thrown together, so at least there’s something making these stories work. This has been seen by hardly anyone on IMDB or Letterboxd, so maybe that will change.

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.

Ace Cruz didn’t just direct and write this, he also stars in it as Billy, a drug dealer who worries about what he’s doing — even as kids are shot in drive-bys while he’s sitting on a park bench — and gets angry at his girl when she’s stripping. And oh yeah, he’s friends with Todd Bridges from Diff’rent Strokes who is using the drugs they should be selling. There are some martial arts scenes — very slow ones — and an ending that is totally Carlito’s Way except that it cost about the condiment budget of craft services for that movie.

Cruz has gone on to make Psychotic, Urban Task Force, Fate, Desert of Death and Outrage: Born In Terror. But when else would he make a movie where Todd Bridges has a different woman in every single scene? That’s why I kept watching this, even when every single person sold out Billy.

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.

Greg Salman has only directed one other movie, Adventures In Pornoland, but after watching Mad Dawg, I’m going to check that out after this and not just because Veronica Hart is in it.

With the main character named Mac (Lamik Blake) and his wife called Lady Mac (Lunden De’Leon), it’s kind of obvious that this is blacksploitation take on Macbeth. Yet it works. There’s one really intense scene where Mac has finally risen up and started a series of bloody killings and his lover has to clean the blood from him in the bath as he just stares into nothingness, overwhelmed by what he’s done. Not what you expect for a low budget gangster movie.

This feels dark and bloody and rough in the best of ways. Lived in, if you will. It’s totally unexpected and I want to go back and live through it again.