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.

Bret McCormick is someone whose movies must be allowed to wash over you. Like this one, which starts with an explanation of what a Bio Tech Warrior is, a “military product of the secret government is intended for use as a policeman, to prevent any insurrection among the citizens in the coming new regime” and something that has been created with pieces and parts of the grey ones.

Sure, it’s a home made costume that looks to combine pieces of BMX gear, a SCUBA suit and some paint, but who cares? When you start with an explanation like that and make a downbeat 90s cyberpunk movie that really wants to be a 60s science gone wrong warning movie, you cannot be wrong or bored.

You just know that if the government made a robot cop for its shadow killing, it would live on human blood.

There’s only one other review of this movie on IMDB and it makes me sad because of how it talks about this movie. They seem angry that they watched it instead of approaching this with the love and wonder that it deserves. Free your mind, my friend.

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.

John and Mark Polonia made a slasher with giallo POV moments in which Def Jam comedians are being killed and they’re all friends of Hollaback (Mike Troy Smith), whose career has been ruined by his act and now is getting threatening phone calls.

Just read that sentence again. That’s all you need to know. The idea that this even exists is why I have this website.

Comedians Brooklyn Mike, Kenny Williams, Rob Stapleton, F.O.B, Harris, Mike Yard, Wil Sylvince, Arnold Acevedo, Brad Lowery, Jay Phillips, Kareem,  Jerry Ford are all in this, as well as man on the street style interviews that set up the movie’s premise of dying on stage when you bomb and having to face off with the audience who is there to potentially ruin your act by booing you.

This has some solid gore despite how basement level the budget was but you know, I kind of love that someone decided to make a black comedy slasher. Who would have come up with that?

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 was directed by Steve Lustgarten, who won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Student Film. When you read the plot — “Unstable thirty-something introvert, who works as a photographer’s assistant, becomes obsessed with his underage female neighbor” — you might think that this is going to be exploitative. It’s not. Instead it comes across as completely real even if we’d never make the decisions that the characters live through.

Written by Lustgarten and his leads, Jay Horenstein (who plays Paul) and Nicole Harrison (who plays Lisa), this movie feels like we’re looking at actual lives. Sadly, American Taboo was the only movie Harrison made during a time that she said that she was “a poet from the Northwest who joyously misspent her youth in Hollywood.” Even more depressing is the fact that she died in 2011 from brain cancer. She feels like someone who could have broken through in some way to be a star.

You can see this as troublesome and wish fulfillment because the young girl is the aggressor in this movie, but it’s also so well made that I didn’t come away feeling strange or grossed out by it. Paul seems like someone who can’t connect with anyone and so when he does feel something with Lisa, it does seem like something that is only happening in his head even if it is the reality within the movie. He feels regret because he sees this as something that he could have kept from doing but Lisa is more of a realistic person, knowing that she wanted it and that it seemed like it was happening regardless of whatever front of morality Paul had erected.

What a strange film to be in the Visual Vengeance library of movies.

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.

Imani (Shatara Curry) has a boyfriend she’s putting through college while she works a job and is in school herself. After giving everything to her man, she feels like he doesn’t care, so after advice from her girlfriends — who are all getting abortions at the same time from the same doctor — she gets rid of him and goes to the club, where she meets Flip (Esteban Lastra) who takes her away for the weekend.

The problem is one of his friends watches her ex grab her behind and they assume she’s a gold digger. She’s drugged and assaulted several times, including after they leave by a hotel worker who she follows and murders. She finds herself hunting down all of the men who raped her before realizing that she may never run out of victims.

This is a movie that somehow combines live performances of spoken word with an abortion and a castration. It’s intense and at the same time quite cheap in the best possible sense of the word, feeling real and messy and I love that. Directed by Roderick Giles and written by Jeff Carroll (Holla If I Kill You), it’s in no way perfect but who needs that? It’s instead a film that looks at the war between the sexes and responds with bullets to the head and knives to dicks.

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’ve watched two of Steve Lustgarten’s movies — this and American Taboo — and I’m really surprised by his directing and writing. Both films seemed like stories I’d have no interest in and they each got me, watching on the edge of my seat.

Kyle Lockwood (Tim Vandeberghe) left town as soon as he could but now he’s back. Maybe Los Angeles didn’t work out like he wanted it to, but then again, the Nebraska small town of his past hasn’t fared that well either. The farmers are pretty much stuck growing marijuana thanks to a predatory drug lord who just so happens to be married to the girl that got away from Kyle.

Some people are happy to have him back home. The cops sure aren’t. They’re reminded of chasing him not all that long ago, him blowing their cars off the dirt trails that act as roads and getting away with it. They aren’t all that thrilled with him being back in town or disrupting the shadow world of cops making money off drugs they’ve enjoyed the last few years. The town has given up its soul and now the black sheep is back to try to pull it out of its thrall.

It’d be any other action movie but you care so much about each character that it just works. John Durbin, who plays main villain Gene Lynch, is so just plain detestable that you want to see everyone succeed. He gets the best exit I’ve seen in some time.

I really enjoyed the time I spent with the people in this movie. They feel real and I cared about what happened to them. How many films can say that?

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.

Ninea Ranks (Keya Smith) entered her life of crime when her man took her on drug deal that fell apart, She hot a man, he went to jail for her where he died and she’s looking for revenge as she leads an all-girl gang made up of T (Tamura Gaston) and Glitter (Dawn Jones).

She’s been going ip against Dion (Tyrone King), who has his own issues with his men Razor (Lewis DaCosta III) and Curtis (Khalid Williams).

This is the kind of movie where every actor was also behind the camera at some point and that it’s mostly the passion project of its director and writer, Randy Williams. It’s taking the 90s gang movie and doing it on the smallest of budgets with a camera that betrays its 1998 origins. And I love it for that. I imagine most of the budget went to Ninea’s wigs, of which there are many.

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 (Aberrations, Dead Clowns), Contagio starts with Calvin (Luc Bernier) and Iris (Isabelle Stephen) going on a camping weekend vacation and then entering a nightmare, as they soon learn that the area that they’re in has seen people going insane.

Filmed in less than a week during the beginning of March 2009, this is the kind of movie that references The Incubus (the car that Calvin and Iris steal has the same license plate as Cassavettes’ car), The Crazies and Night of the Demon (the sheriff’s name is from that film). I’m kind of surprised by the level of people not liking this movie on IMDB and Letterboxd, because it has some great effects — I mean, a man literally pulls his own head in half and everything inside messily vomits out — and is obviously made with no budget at all. Sure, Calvin and Iris are both morons — I judged him as soon as he wore that driving hat and wondered how he was able to have such an attractive partner — but what horror movie leads are all that smart anyway?

Yes, I also get that the leg wound that Iris gets would leave her unable to walk. Yes, the footage of the helicopters is obviously stock and doesn’t feel like it fits where the movie takes place. Yes, Calvin may be a complete moron until he suddenly is an expert in science and figures out that there’s a cloud that goes into people’s eyes and makes them into infected killers.

That said, I had fun. Sometimes, you can just watch something and shut your brain off, you know?

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 these movies on Tubi: Blood of the Chupacabras and Revenge of the Chupacabras. You can read an interview with the director here and get this on blu ray from Diabolik DVD.

Visual Vengeance has brought back two Blockbuster Video shelf favorites, both concerning the infernal Mexican goatsucker known as el chupacabra! In the book Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, these films are credited with starting the trend in movies about the chupacabras.

Blood of the Chupacabras (2003): If you read any reviews that came out on this movie’s original release, they all decry the fact that the poster and cover art are so amazing and the actual monster is not. But you know, that’s part of the charm in director and writer Jonathan Mumm’s movie (he also edited and composed some of the music).

The town that this takes place in has near Andy Milligan level supernatural coincidences: there’s a witch. There’s an old vampire hunter. There’s a singer. There’s an old prospector! And yes, there’s a chupacabra controlling possessed townsfolk from within a cave.

There are so many people in this town and let me tell you, I kind of love that the majority of this movie is people arguing over rent and trying to figure out how to survive in their downtrodden lives and then realizing, “Oh yeah. There’s a monster that kills goats in a cave.” That’s how real life is. You know that there are so many evil creatures in the woods outside of town but you live in a capitalist society and the cogs of the military-industrial complex are greased in the blood of the working man.

In addition to all of those characters — seriously, if you missed meeting new people in the new COVID era, get ready to meet so many people and then meet some more people — this movie has a synth score that in no way tries to sound real. You may be too young to remember organ stores in the mall and the poor souls that worked there that had to non-stop play synth and organ ditties while we shopped around them. Who were these people buying these gigantic organs? Where was the budget to hire so many people to play them? Where did they all go?

I digress.

I love when people review this movie and say it has so much talking. Yes, it’s a 1950s drive-in movie with no budget shot on video (with some 16mm from the first pass at making it) with rubber suits, early CGI and untrained actors. Revel in it. Soak it up. We should all be so lucky to live in a world that this movie exists and we do.

Revenge of the Chupcacabras (2005): 

Just look at that image of a humanoid chupacabra and remember 2005, a time when life was much, much simpler than today and we had no idea. We could still rent movies in stores. And yeah, things are probably more convenient today, but we also had movies with chupacabras. Two in a row, no less, from Jonathan Mumm, who directed and wrote this.

You know what’s really crazy? This movie isn’t even about a chupacabra. It’s about a kidnapping. A chupacabra shows up — and it looks better than the first movie because people whined that they got a cool looking poster and that monster wasn’t in the movie and have you people never watched an exploitation movie before?!? — but this is really about a kidnapping. I am all for the bait and switch, folks.

Also in 2005, you could kidnap an attractive college student and ask for $2 million and no one laughed at you. Today, we don’t believe in science so we would just giggle and try and negotiate the ransom.

This movie makes me want to love it and as such has a scene where a priest investigates the possessions going on in this small town and gets killed by a chupacabra and honestly, that’s all I want movies to be about.

The tagline is “It can smell your fear.” Can it also smell how happy I am to look over and see this movie on my shelf and be so happy that I own it, much less the gorgeous Visual Vengeance blu ray? You got me goat killer!

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. You can get this on blu ray from MVD.

In the small town of Copperton, Ohio, Paul Henson (Dino Tripodis), a former big-city journalist, buys a small local newspaper. He quickly falls into a wide-reaching conspiracy of ritualistic199 murder and cult mind control when he discovers that the entire town may be under the spell of Reverend Donovan (Nick Baldasare, Beyond Dream’s Door), Reverend Kane (John Dunleavy) and their flock. As the clues and corpses pile up, Henson and his family are thrust into a life-or-death struggle to expose the truth and stop the demonic cabal’s reign of evil.

Shot in 1989 by director Eric Swelstad on 16mm film and lost in obscurity and distribution false starts for over 30 years, Heartland of Darkness finally arrives on home video for the very first time and is packed with bonus features that spotlight the original creators and document the film’s long history and final completion.

Filmed as Fallen Angels, which was changed to Blood Church and then Heartland of Darkness, Swelstad abandoned the project before finding a distributor. Over the years various producers including Jim Wynorski, Rob Spera and Jody Savin wanted to release the film, but nothing happened. It almost came out from Media Blasters in 2004 before Visual Vengeance became the company to finish it and get it out into the world.

If that doesn’t sell you, Linnea Quigley plays an evil teacher.

I have no idea why this ever got lost. It’s a perfect early 90s direct to video horror film, but perhaps even better than the other movies you would have found on the shelf. Swlstad has a great eye for filmmaking and puts story over simple gore.

BONUS: I had the chance to speak with director Eric Swelstad about this film and his career.

B&S About Movies: This movie has been gestating for decades, right?

Eric Swelstad: It sure has. The original film was shot as Fallen Angels back in 1989, we ran out of money to finish it. At the time, the distributor in Florida named it Blood Church. And for a long time it had that name, but they also didn’t have the money to finish it. So for a long time, it sat on a literal shelf, waiting to be finished. And then finally, after the last couple of years, we want to get the money together to finish it and we were happy that Visual Vengeance made an offer to release it.

B&S: What do you think of what they did with your movie?

Eric: I think it’s terrific. I was telling Rob that I think his line is like the Criterion of, of, you know, genre releases. It’s really great. The packaging is terrific. The special features are great. There are three commentary track and a behind the scenes documentary that we made, as well as a bunch of other goodies that people can get.

B&S: You’re from Ohio, correct?

Eric: I grew up in both Indiana and Ohio. I went to college at Ohio State University where this was actually a master’s thesis for myself and my cinematographer. So great memories and great times at Ohio State.

B&S: You’re also part of another OSU student film, Beyond Dream’s Door, right?

Eric: Exactly. I was one of the ADs on that film. It was a great experience. So that was how I learned about making a feature at the university and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I’m going to try to do this as well for my Master’s.” And we were able to pull it off.

B&S: I love that both of those movies came out of OSU. They don’t feel like anything else on the shelves at the time.

Eric: Exactly. Yeah, they’re a little bit unique. And of course, some of the same actors like Nick Baldasare and John Dunleavy are in both films. And, of course, our movie was made at the height of the Satanic Panic in the late 80s. So we were capitalizing on what was going on in the country at the time. And it was on the news all the time. We capitalized on that. I came up with the idea for the script. And I said, “Man, this would be a great topic to deal with. made it an action film.”

You know, it’s like a horror action film.

B&S: Were you a horror fan before you made this?

Eric: I was a horror fan. I was more into like movies like Halloween and The Exorcist. You know, I was bmore into those films than I was into stuff like Italian giallo cinema. But I certainly was more into the occult. The Omen was a big influence. Films like that where you’re kind of like thinking, okay, these are ordinary people, but this crazy scary stuff is happening to them. That was what was interesting to me. And then, of course, I love action films. So I incorporated that into the action aspect of this to make it what I call an action horror film.

B&S: What were your influences on this?

Eric: I was heavily influenced by the usual suspects. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin. Coppola, of course, was a huge influence. You know, there were just so many. John Carpenter. I just looked I finally got to meet him a few years ago and I told him just how important Halloween and Escape from New York were to me. I mean, all those great, great films, and I know he’s heard it a hundred times before, but he was so nice. I also recently met Walter Hill. One of my favorites. Yeah, my favorite directors from the 70s and 80s. And I told him, I teach a class about theology in film and we screened The Warriors as an example of Greek mythology and he was tickled by that.

B&S: What do you do today?

Eric: I’m the head of the film department at Valley College in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley and love it. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years now. And it’s been great. In fact, I hired some of my students to do some work on this film on Heartland of Darkness. They helped sound with the mix and one of my top students, she produced the documentary Deeper Into the Darkness, which is the behind the scenes movie. It was great having my students work on the main show.

B&S: What’s it like seeing young students being at where you were when you made this movie?

Eric: It’s so inspiring because I give them all these warnings about what not to do, because I went through it and the biggest one I tell them is don’t make a feature film if you can’t finish it. Don’t run out of money like we did. The things that we messed up on this movie are great lessons for today. I mean, things ranging from direction to editing, a whole bunch of stuff. So I think if anything, I just enjoy sharing experiences with the students to let them know what worked for us and what didn’t work for us.

B&S: I love the films that Visual Vengeance is putting out because they’re all so original. And even though the technology to make movies is more available and it should be so much more democratic to shoot a movie today, you don’t see the same drive.

Eric: The tools to make low budget films are there and it’s great. And you know, you could literally could go out and make your own feature film on your cell phone, which is wonderful. But you’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to have something to say. There are so many films that never see the light of day because they’re not that good. And there’s a reason for that. If you’re going to pour your heart and soul into something, you want it to be really good. You don’t want to be like something they would find any every other day. And it just you know, I teach screenwriting, so I talk about, it’s all about the story. It’s all about the script. You’ve got to have a really interesting story to begin and a lot of horror films today. I’m not really into because so many movies today are built around the jumpscare. How many jumpscare should we have in this film? Where the jumpscare is going to be? And that’s just a cliche. Anybody can do a jumpscare! You can put a sheet over your head and jump out at somebody and that’s a jumpscare. But it needs a story. It needs characters that we care about and follow.

B&S: I hate when people say, “Well, Val Lewton’s movies had jumpscares.” Well, they also had stories.

Eric: The great directors that we think of, you know, they didn’t just jump stuff out. They actually had stories. One of my mentors was the late great Robert Wise. He directed a lot of great movies, one of my favorite horror films he did was called The Haunting. That movie is so scary because of sound. It’s what you don’t see that is scary. And the sound is so good in that film and other films like that too. We can all learn from those master filmmakers about how to do horror films.

You’ve got to have a great script. I mean, that was a great script. The remakes that have come out have suffered because they were all about the technical stuff, the jumpscares and they really weren’t about the story. So if you spend time on the story, you’re gonna nail it. You’re gonna get a really cool film, but it’s all about the story. You’ve got to go back and think about character, plot development, character arc. The third act is critical. So all those things may add up to a really good movie.

B&S: I keep getting fooled by the A24-style horror movies that have a great trailer and a not-so-great final film.

Eric: They run out of steam. They delivered it on the first and second act, but by the ending, they’re like, “Oh, we already showed all that stuff. Let’s just wrap it up.”

Look at something like John Carpenter’s Halloween. To really know how to just do a great payoff, he had such a great ending and great characters. Now that’s a good example of how to end a movie. The Exorcist is like that as well. You’ve got the stick the landing.

Imagine if The Omen petered out before the ending.

B&S: Do you advise to start with that ending?

Eric: If you start backward, you know, you can come up with a really good ending and you work backward. That can sometimes work but you got to have a really, really good ending that we don’t see coming. I tell my students, “Twist endings are great. You’ve got to build to them. You got to have a great delivery, but you got to have stuff before that.”

You can do a good twist today. All movies need to have a twist. You’ve got to have something we don’t see coming. Otherwise, no one’s gonna make it.

B&S: What has worked for you lately?

Eric: I really liked It Follows. A lot of it is shot like Halloween, with the stuff shot during daylight and I love that they did really creepy things shot during broad daylight.