Roger Watkins was born in Binghamton, New York and graduated from Oneonta State College in with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. He served as an apprentice for Freddie Francis, Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray. He wrote Mystique for Roberta Findlay and as Richard Mahler, he made Her Name Was Lisa, Midnight Heat, Corruption and American Babylon, movies that were porn but had no interest in getting anyone turned on.

He’s probably best known for his 1973 movie The Last House On Dead End Street, which is also knwon as At the Hour of Our Death , The Fun House and The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell. It’s charitably one of the most mentally deranged movies I’ve seen and I say that with respect. For years, because the movie was made with no real names, rumors were spread that it was a snuff film. In truth, it’s a $3,000 down and dirty movie that really had an $800 budget because Watkins spent most of the money on drugs.

It took until 1989 when Chas Balun revealed that Watkins made the movie. In 2000, Watkins posted on the internet that it was really him and the film was released. The full 175-minute version seems lost forever, even if the story of a Chicago riot and fire destroying the print seems as true as the story that there’s a real murder in the film.

On the 2002 DVD release of the movie, Black Snow and several other Watkins short films appeared. I love that he did commentary over this, calling it “a piece of shit” and that it proved just how easy it was to make avant-garde bullshit. Then again, after he told Nicholas Ray that, the director told him, “Maybe it’s easy for you, Roger.”

It’s basically people walking through the snow and showing their darkness, which must have some kind of message behind it. Except Watkins laughs through the whole thing, which is so strange to me, as I assumed that he was as dark as he is in The Last House On Dead End Street and not someone having fun rewatching a college project.

In 2015, Vinegar Syndrome claimed that they were making a perfect version of The Last House but that seems like it’s never going to happen. The uncut version of the movie is hidden on their release of Corruption, so there’s that.

You can watch this on YouTube.

My wife has started doing craft shows selling dog bandanas. Check her work on Instagram. Over the last few months, we’ve been doing a lot of Christmas craft fairs. Other than the demons, I can say from a first-person perspective that Christmas Craft Fair Massacre is the most realistic and truthful movie about craft fairs ever committed to film. Or digital video.

Max Raven and Bando Glutz, well, in the words of Judith Priest, I can neither confirm nor deny that they are also Bret McCormick.

Houston’s Central High School was built on a Native American burial ground — I live next to the second largest one in the eastern part of the country — which means it has lured devil worshippers there, like Principal Mortimer Shade (Tytus Berry), to find the one pure soul — Julie Purebred (Rebecca Bills) — with the help of the mask-wearing Ned (Max Raven). He’s also struggling against the lady who runs the mall, Megara Pendragon (Victoria Chaney), who wants her soul as well.

So yes, this movie may feel like it’s been shot on phones and has long talking sequences that were edited together to make it seem like everyone was in the same room. Who cares? It also has a priest, a shaman, someone who may be the director as well and a nice lady all work together to drop a telekinetic nuke on the craft fair, saving the world and our souls.

I have sat in these fairs and stared at the clock for what seems like days upon days and only ten minutes has moved and maybe I don’t want to be there, but I really love my wife and will do anything for her. But if I could drop a mind bomb on the Monongahela Y before sitting there again for eight hours while someone next to me super hard sells fiberfill pillows and I’ve heard their lines hundreds of times, man, I would drop a bomb that would give Oppenheimer a boner from beyond the grave.

Every review that doesn’t understand this movie was written a person without any holiday spirit.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Enzo Milioni, That Strange Desire is the story of two aliens from the planet Alpha 4 who have been on the game show Cripto-Tivvu and won a trip to our planet. They possess the bodies of  Casimiro (Nico Salatino) and Peppino (Gianni Ciardo) and learn that while their race has not had sex for thousands of years, it’s still an act here on our planet.

Filmed almost entirely at the former Grand Hotel Ambasciatori in Bari, this comes from the director of The Sister of Ursula, so you should not be surprised when it feels a bit scuzzy. Most of the movie feels like he turned the camera on and filmed whatever happened and then threw some wacky music over it.

For some reason, this movie has two very quick moments of hardcore inserts, which seem even more gratuitous than usual. I also wonder how this made it on the list of Italian Gothic films I’ve been working from, but at least I made it through this one.

The cast also includes Antonella Antinori (who did some adult as well as mainstream movies like Maya, Play Motel and Burial Ground), Marina Hedman (again, lots of adult but also appeared in Images In a Convent and La bimba di Satana, as well as Jess Franco’s Elles font tout and an Amazon in Starcrash), Maria D’Alessandro (Hotel Fear, Concorde Affaire ’79) and Dirce Funari (Porno Holocaust, Blue Movie and also an Amazon in Starcrash).

Blowjob has nothing to do with the sex act of its title and more to do with the works of Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley. It was the follow-up to Blue Movie for director Alberto Cavallone, who said that it was a “deliberately pornographic film, but with political content. A movie about violence as a means of communication and knowledge in a repressive society.” Cavallone also claimed that it had no actual sex, which several performers dispute, as there were different cuts of the film. It was shot as The Naked Witch.

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.

The titular storm in director Shinji Sômai’s Typhoon Club (Taifû kurabu; Japan, 1985) is both a literal one, as the story takes place before, during, and after a typhoon event in Japan, and a figurative one as a group of rural junior high school students deal with the realities of teen life and the frustrations of a lack of adult role models. Yuji Kato’s screenplay treats its teenage characters with a realistic eye, and the ensemble cast of young performers nail every nuance that is asked of them.

Starting with the near-drowning of a boy by the girls he was spying on at the school pool — closed at night, but when did that ever stop teenagers who wanted to swim by the moonlight? — and featuring a maddening sequence of a boy stalking and terrorizing a girl classmate — whose back he has scarred with acid during science class in an earlier scene — inside their school that is more unnerving than many horror movie scenes, there are many reflections on death and danger. Typhoon Club isn’t solely focused on the gloomy, though, as the students try their best to live life their way, including a lesbian couple and their energetic friend, and a boy who hopes to escape his smaller town and attend high school in Tokyo. There’s a dance sequence that feels more authentic than practically any one that you can name from a major Hollywood feature about teenagers.

Beautifully shot, framed, helmed, written, and performed, Typhoon Club deserves its reputation as a classic slice of Japanese cinema. If you haven’t seen it before, this new 4K restoration is a perfect way to watch it.

Typhoon Club, from Third Window Films, is now available in a new 4K restoration, region-free blu ray.

Bonus Features

• New 4K digital remaster from the original negatives
• Feature audio commentary by Tom Mes
• Selected audio commentary by Josh Slater-Williams
• Assistant Director Koji Enokido Talk Event
• Introduction by Ryusuke Hamaguchi at the Berlin Film Festival
• Trailer 
• Slipcase with artwork from Gokaiju
• ‘Director’s Company’ edition featuring insert by Jasper Sharp – limited to 2000 copies

Directed by Erskine Forde and written by Eliza Hayes Maher (Deadly DILF) and Tiffany Yarde, this is the story of Caribbean cousins Fabienne Larke (Mishael Morgan) and Mirlande Holder (Andrea Lewis) who have decided to start a clothing company together. Fabienne is also a lawyer for a company that is trying to break a strike led by Zayn (Daniel Malik), a fiery union leader. What she doesn’t know is that she was only picked for this role because she’s a woman of color with a mother who was a factory worker. Can the cousins start their business and make it work when they are so unalike now — Fabienne being shy and devoted to work and Mirlande being live on social all the time and floating through her existence — or will things fail?

A lot of this movie is expected but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t entertaining. Actually, the fighting between the cousins felt authentic. I also liked that the movie didn’t go down the everyday route of having Fabienne and Zayn fall in love. There are some good messages about family, sticking with what you believe in and giving to others, as the cousins eventually create a company that gives clothing to young people who can’t afford interview clothes. Another fun Tubi movie!

You can watch this on Tubi.

The only copy I can find of Screams In the Night is, as nicely as I can put it, beat to shit. Whole sections of it turn into static and digital noise, the quality is at least fifth generation and the sound is barely listenable. There are no subtitles, either. And yet, in a world of 4K everything, I appreciate these analog moments when a movie looks bad and you need to fit to make it matter.

The marriage between Andrea (Rossano Brazzi) and Barbara (Maitena Galli) is near the end, beyond the saving that a vacation to Istanbul can provide. Yet they go anyway, along with his assistant Sylvia (Sylva Koscina), to a villa whose last tenant, a sculptor named Claudine, hung herself. The housekeeper Fatma (Güzin Özipek) keeps secrets, like how she practically worships the dead woman. Speaking of secrets, Sylvia and Barbara have some of their own, as they have begun their own relationship away from the impotent surgeon husband, who is convinced people are trying to kill him. Also, as this is a fantastic, Claudine’s spirit finds her way to Sylvia.

According to Roberto Curti in his book Italian Gothic Horror Films 1970-1979, director and writer Pupi Avati refused to “oblige to the rules of commercial film-making” and this movie — thought of as improvisational film jazz, mostly written and shot on the spot — was him trying yet again to create his own vision. While his previous TV movie Jazz Band was well-received, none of his movies had made money (there’s a moment in Curti’s guide to 1980s Italian Gothic where Lamberto Bava, while speaking about his film Macabre, says “…a week after the film’s release, the producer told me it was the first Avati production that made any money.).

This begins with a ratcatcher (Ferdinando Orlandi) staying overnight at a farmhouse and telling a young girl a bedtime story. There was once a house in the swamp and in it lived a family — father Giove (Adolfo Belletti) and his sons Silvano (Lino Capolicchio), Marione (Gianni Cavina), Marzio (Giulio Pizzirani) and Bracco (Carlo Delle Piane) — in a place where no woman had been for years. Possibly, this was because Giove’s wife died while giving birth to his fourth son.

One night, a pianist named Olimpia (Roberta Paladini, What Have They Done With Your Daughters?) appeared and in time, each member of the family asked her to marry them. She accepted each of their engagements and the marriages were celebrated throughout the day and night. But the next day, she was gone and they were all dead in a tableau reminiscent of Leornardo’s The Last Supper.

As the ratcatcher finishes his story, we notice that the girl looks just like Olimpia.

Pizzirani remembered that it was not an easy movie to make. “We did not know anything about the story. Pupi showed up at morning, gave us a sheet of paper and we had to study our lines. Sometimes the dialogue lines were not call and response, and I recall having to learn very long parts, deadly difficult speeches which later on I would repeat, improvising upon them a bit. It was traumatic.”

What emerges is a story made of stories and each of those tales deals with how we confront the story we don’t know the ending of. Our own. Avati said, “I have a problem with death and so I tried to make it beautiful, sunny, warm.” Is Olimpia even real? Did the mother die or leave the men alone to their own lives? How much is allegory and how much is actual? Avati always makes me ask so many questions.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ignore the Lucio Fulci Presents, as he had nothing to do with this other than to sign over his name. It was directed by Enzo Milioni, who also made Quello strano desiderio and The Sister of Ursula, and was written by Millioni and Giovanni Simonelli, who directed Hansel e Gretel.