ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict 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.

Official synopsis: A private detective is hired to find a woman who has apparently been murdered in a snuff film. It turns out the woman’s not dead, but very much alive, and he gets sucked into a torrid affair that leaves him questioning his sense of reality. An eerie, seedy, dreamlike noir with fractured, time-bending overtones of John Boorman’s Point Blank and Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

 You want odd? Writer/director Atsushi Yamatoya has you covered with Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, a black-and-white crime feature that boasts both pinku eiga and noir elements. Fair warning: This one is a roughie, with sexual assault and other forms of violence against naked and clothed (if partially so) women.  

Hitman/private eye Shō (Yūichi Minato) is hired by real estate agent Naka (Seigi Nogami) to rescue his girlfriend Sae (Noriko Tatsumi) from criminals who film their assaults on her and send the reels to Naka. Among the gang members is bar owner Kō (Shōhei Yamamoto), who assaulted and murdered Shō’s girlfriend Rie (Mari Nagisa). Shō’ finds Kō’s girlfriend Mina (Mika Watari) waiting for him at his hotel, and he roughs her up before giving in to her request for sex. Things get crazier from there — as if they weren’t enough already — and at times I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but the insanity was so intriguing that the film had my full attention throughout. 

Yamatoya, who wrote such screenplays as Branded to Kill and Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, infuses the film with disarming time jumps, arthouse experimentation, and a cool jazz soundtrack. The performances are gripping, even if there isn’t a character to feel comfortable about supporting.

Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands is the type of film that you just have to give into and go along for the discomfiting, eerie ride. You may feel like you need a shower afterward, but you’ll also have seen a historical slice of genre film bravado. 

Deaf Crocodile’s restored version of Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands premiered on OVID on October 17, 2025. For more information, visit https://www.ovid.tv/. 

“In October 2006, the community of Briar, Alabama, was terrorized by a series of gruesome killings. This film is an account of the horrors that unfolded during that fateful autumn.”

That’s all that Joe Meredith is telling you about his latest film.

At times, this feels like a true doc. At others, a slasher. And then it feels like nothing else —a movie that approaches the SOV fuzz haze I love, a town filled with darkness, conspiracies, lost in a world that believes in nothing but decay.

There’s a moment when the strange mutant children of Briar are shown in artwork form, and it’s more frightening than any big-budget CGI that you will see this year. And now, there’s also an axe killer, heads getting sliced clean off their bodies and just a sense of dread in every frame. 

People always ask, “What movies scare you?” Joe Meredith’s movies scare me in the best of ways. Instead of falling back on his video game-infused future splatterpunk explorations, this is a totally different tone for him. There’s a final girl named Jax (Cidney Meredith) who is absolutely perfect here; I feel like Chris Farley reviewing this movie. “Remember when you cut off that head, Joe? Yeah? That was awesome.”

This begins and ends with video-distorted Halloween imagery, yet even in those, an evil baby is crying. It’s funny, because in so much horror, I see people walk toward monsters, and I never want them — or the camera — to stop getting closer. In Meredith’s films, I want a distance. I want to stay away, and yet I keep creeping closer, and when that little girl screams upon confronting the cojoined twin baby doll carrying a mutant, I feel like crying too, and the catharsis reminds me why I keep watching movies.

This is pure SOV black tar movie drugs, the kind that I wake up in another room, in the dark, thinking I’m back at my parents’ house, but no, I’m just high in the basement and don’t know how to get back upstairs. Thanks for dosing me, Joe.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invaders from Mars was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 12, 1966 at 11:20 p.m.; Saturday, August 5, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.; Saturday, January 4, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, April 5, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, October 20, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 23, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

Directed by William Cameron Menzies and written by Richard Blake, Invaders from Mars was made in a hurry to beat George Pal’s War of the Worlds to theaters. It worked; Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Martin Scorsese, and John Landis have all said it was an influence. 

David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) wakes up to a thunderstorm and sees a UFO. His father, George (Leif Erickson), goes to investigate, and when he comes back, he’s not the same person. He tells David and his mother (Hillary Brooke) that there was no flying saucer. The cops arrive and tell David the same thing. As for the other kids, one of them, Kathy (Janine Perreau), disappears after the spaceship lands, then comes home and burns her house down. 

Only Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter) believes him. Working with Dr. Stuart Kelston (Arthur Franz) and Col. Fielding (Morris Ankrum), she realizes that the aliens are in town to take our nukes. Anyone controlled by the aliens has devices in their heads that cause their heads to blow up real good, but despite Martian rays and technology, good old-fashioned U.S. war mania wipes them out. Or so we believe, but it all turns out to be a dream, with David waking up to the UFO landing all over again.

The Martian leader is played by Luce Potter. She was also one of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and said that she received letters from adults telling her how much she had scared them when they were kids.

I enjoy this one and love the Tobe Hooper remake even more.

You can watch this on Tubi.