There has been a Laemmle in the movie business since there’s been a movie business. Carl Laemmle started Universal Pictures and his nephews Max and Kurt started the Laemmle theater chain.

Decades later, we have this film, the story of a beloved Arthouse Cinema chain in Los Angeles with an astounding legacy. Over four generations, Laemmle’s have dedicated themselves to supporting, innovating, and elevating the art of filmmaking. Popularizing independent films, documentary films, and their filmmakers, the Laemmle Theatres’ impact on Hollywood and world cinema cannot be overstated. Filmed over 2+ years, Only in Theaters chronicles the Laemmle family, their business, and their determination to survive. But in a changing world, this is also a story about the future of cinema.

Filmed over two years, Only in Theaters is about this family, their business and their determination to survive. Maybe it’s about the future of cinema and how we’ll see movies in the future. Hopefully, that will be in movie houses. Directed by Raphael Sbarge, this has appearances by Ava DuVernay, Cameron Crowe, Allison Anders and Leonard Maltin.

I really felt for Greg Laemmle in this. He had so much to consider and felt that he was close to solving it before COVID-19. Yet in spite of all he and his theaters have endured, he seems to endure.

I always think about those lucky enough to live in Austin, New York or Los Angeles and the theaters they have to support. The closest theater to us is at least half an hour away. While I consume so many movies a day, it’s rare that I actually see them on anything other than a TV or laptop. This movie made me want to change that, even if I have to get away from my comfortable home.

You can get this on DVD from Kino Lorber.

I’ve really been getting into the Unsung Horrors podcast and was overjoyed to discover a remake remix rip-off movie that I never knew about. Even better, it’s based on one of my favorite movies: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue AKA No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos (Don’t Disturb the Sleep of the Dead), Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Living Dead, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue and Don’t Open the Window.

Kang Myeong — the George Meaning of this movie — gets a ride from Soo-ji — Edna Simmonds — on his way to a seminar on the environment while she’s traveling to check up on her sister Jyun-ji. — Katie — and her husband Yeong-tae Jeong — Martin — only to learn that he’s dead.

Well, not for long.

One of Kang Myeong’s American teachers is now working at a supersonic transmitter that is removing insects in a more humane way, but it’s also animating the nerves of the newly dead. We learn this when the town drunk — who has been dead for several days — attacks Soo-Ji.

What’s different here is that nearly everyone has had their sharp edges smoothed off. Kang Myerong is never as mean to Soo-Ji as Geroge was to Edna, but then again, he isn’t as gorgeous as Ray Lovelock. But otherwise — up until three-quarters of the way through this movie — this is the same movie that you know and love under so many titles. It’s also missing the gore and when a movie is known for just how upsetting its moments of violence are, that’s a pretty big loss.

The other thing you might miss is that the cops come around a lot faster and the head officer is in no way as much of a real cop as Arthur Kennedy was.

Yet what makes up for this is just how weird it is that we have an alternative reality version of this movie and that the zombies are basically all painted silver, which is again in contrast to the very realistic dead bodies that populated Jorge Grau’s horror masterpiece. It attempts to make up for this with shocking photos of actual birth defects, as the movie goes further than its inspiration by stating that the machine is turning new babies into monsters.

Another title for this South Korean zombie xerox is Strange Dead Bodies, which is a fabulous alternative and one that would get me into the theater (or, you know, in front of my TV).

You can watch this on the Korean Film Archive YouTube channel.

You have to give some credit to Brazilian director and writer Adriano Stuart, who got his Jaws parody into theaters the same year as the movie its making fun of, even ahead of the adult parody Gums.

A cod from Guinea is threatening to ruin the fishing season of São Paulo, so local authorities call everyone you would expect, like a Portuguese oceanographer and a tough fisherman who uses the records of “Rainha do Fado” Amália Rodrigues as bait.

This is as down and dirty as you can imagine a Brazilian ripoff film made in days can be. The jokes are dated and stereotypical. If the idea that Sheriff Brody is gay is hilarious to you, then you get it. So many of the jokes in the film are ones that you have to literally be there and by that I mean someone from Brazil.

They did make a nice poster, at least.

A lot of people — me included — get excited about Turkish riffs on films, even if Turkish Star Wars is so much more its own movie — Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — than just slavish devotion to remaking Lucas’ movie. Yet most of the movies that are being remade, remixed and ripped off are ones that people have some level of affinity for. Creating a new version of Mr. Majestyk is a much bigger swing.

Directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz and written by Ahmet Ündag, Karpuzcu starts with an incredibly long scene of men picking fruit — yes, this is also about watermelons, just like the Bronson-starring inspiration — with star Dilber Ay sweating under the sun as a woman holds two large melons to her chest, laughing.

Whereas Vincent Majestyk’s main concern was getting his crop in on time so he can survive another season, this has our hero’s woman abducted and sexually assaulted in a scene that goes on forever and worse, it’s pretty close to hardcore — indeed, this movie has inserts from another reel with the exact same actors — and it causes Dilber Ay’s character to get his revenge. He has a little over an hour — well, like half of that by the time the scene is over — to kill them all.

The name of the movie, according to the translation site I am using, is Watermelon Maker.

You can download this on the Internet Archive.

Kartal Yuvasi means Eagle’s Nest but a quick look at this movie will clue you in that director Natuk Baytan and writer Tarik Dursun Kakinç are really making their own version of Straw Dogs.

Yet this movie is very much its own movie.

That’s because it’s filtered through the lens of creators coming from a country quite unlike our own. At the time of filming, the setting of Cyprus was in the middle of a battle between Greece and Turkey with the Turkish Muslims being forced out of their homeland. That’s quite a different setting than Wakely. And there is no David Sumner character in this, instead two women, one young and another old.

The closest thing this movie has to Dustin Hoffman’s character is Murat, a doctor who is returning home along with his new English fiancee Mary. When he’s called away for an emergency, Mary must stay with Murat’s mother Makbule, a Muslim woman who the town already distrusts and outright hates. Even worse for them, the very idea that mary would convert from Catholicism for her husband is enough to rile them up into outright sexual assault, a much different reason for the crime than Peckinpah’s film.

During the climactic attack on the house, the mother even reveals a Turkish flag under her clothes and plays matching band covers of their national anthem while getting thrown off the steps by men much larger than her. Then the movie juxtaposes this battle with actual footage of Turkish soldiers retaking the town from the Greek army. That’s the second weirdest crosscutting in this, as Mary’s rape is played against the birth of a baby.

I’ve debated in my head if Straw Dogs is art or exploitation. This film definitely leans toward the latter, yet is also a political message, which is pretty fascinating.

You can watch this on one of the best channels on YouTube, White Slaves of Chinatown.

Aç Kartallar (Hungry Eagles) was directed and written by Çetin Inanç, the man who also brought us Kara Simsek, Kizil maske, Vahsi Kan and 150 or so other films from 1967 to 2002. He’s best known in America for Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) which is also called Turkish Star Wars.

Nihat Yigit plays our stand-in for Bruce Lee, as this is Brucesploitation of the highest order. He was a huge fan of Lee, taking up martial arts after the star’s death in 1973. He fought in karate tournaments all over Europe before Inanc discovered him and cast him as a villain opposite his greatest star, Cuneyt Arkin.

This has the most basic of all martial arts plots: When their martial arts master is murdered by a rival clan, that man’s top three students vow to get revenge.

Inanc can’t help but make his fight scenes work harder than anyone else’s and by that, I mean he speeds them up to Benny Hill on amphetamines level. There’s something he does that I’ve never seen in another director’s style: you feel like you are in the middle of the fights, as if your neck snaps with the punches. They can be exhausting and I mean that in the best sense of the word.

Beyond seeing a Turkish Bruce Lee, this also proves that Turkish filmmakers care about copyright about as much as Godfrey Ho. This has music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Enter the Dragon and, perhaps most incredibly, Suspiria.

Nearly every country in the world has created their own Bruce Lee. Yes, it took Turkey way longer than nearly every other place in the world, but let’s give them credit for this, a movie where a man throws what appears to be actual dynamite at other people while the camera keeps rolling.

Bülent has an abusive dad and Ali just has a mom and a dog. Well, he had a dog until a policeman shoots and kills it. They’re in the same school and become friends and bond over the alien that they meet, Badi, who completely seriously shoots smoke out of his penis at one point.

In a kids’ movie.

He also eats Turkish Treat instead of Reese’s Pieces and looks through a porn mag, so…I wonder how much of E.T. that director Zafer Par and writer Baris Pirhasan saw before they made this. Probably just as much as Müjdat Gezen when he directed and wrote Homoti.

The craziest. thing is that Badi gives multiple heart attacks to humans both good and bad who are so overwhelmed by his appearance that their hearts literally stop working. The scene where he causes a teacher to have cardiac arrest is played for comedy, just after his appearance upsets a janitor so much that he falls down the steps to possibly his death.

Bülent and Ali give inflammatory speeches to the local kids, who take over an amusement park so Badi can use a Ferris wheel as an antenna to, well, phone home. When the villagers come with torches, along with cops, the kids put on masks and start throwing smoke bombs at adults — this movie is absolutely wild as it has kids rioting in the streets — and help Bodi get back home.

It’s…something.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.