Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis) is a delightful old biddy who runs a wig shop. She’s quirky, she’s eccentric, and she has a bit of a supply chain issue. You see, synthetic hair is for amateurs. Mrs. Pringle only deals in the real deal.

Enter her son, Rodney (Chris Martell). Rodney is… well, Rodney is a lot. He’s got the mental capacity of a toddler and the hobby of a 17th-century frontiersman. He spends his days renting rooms to local college girls, only to promptly scalp them to keep his mother’s inventory fresh.

Herschell Gordon Lewis was never one for subtlety, but the opening of The Gruesome Twosome is truly in a league of its own. Before we even see a drop of gore, we watch two styrofoam heads talk to one another. This opening four-minute segment was filmed in Chicago, months after production ended. During post-production, it was discovered that the running time was too short.

In case you wonder why people are eating Kentucky Fried Chicken while go-go dancing, Lewis was an advertising guy and would always make a deal with the franchise to appear in his movies so that he could feed it to his cast. Just imagine: Hot Florida weather, gore made from sheep guts that sits in Lysol when not used, and slowly growing cold, greasy chicken. This is what his movies crawled from, like primordial proto-slasher amphibians that have just learned to emerge on land. 

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Li Yueh (Jimmy Wang Yu) gets revenge on the man who killed his father. That killer? A high-ranking official, who gets a price on his head and needs him to go into hiding. He doesn’t even tell his girlfriend, Liu (Ping Chin), that he’s disappearing. Later, she meets Fang Chun-chao, a swordsman who defends her from the Flying Fish gang. Fang is hired to train her in swordplay and ends up pining for her. She’s still in love with Li Yueh, however. Because Fang believes in honor, he decides to find her missing love.

The Flying Fish return to hunt down Fang, who is saved by his friend, a lowly stable worker. Of course, that person is Li Yueh. Together, they work to stop the threat of the different gang members. But if you’re a hero — or anyone, really — in a Chang Cheh movie, you may not make it to the end alive.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by film critic David West. You can get it from MVD.

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/. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gamera vs. Gyaos was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 30, 1968, at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, September 12, 1970, at 11:30 p.m. as Return of the Giant Monsters, the title that American-International Television used when they re-edited it.

It all starts when a series of volcanoes go off, attracting Gamera, who enters one of them. This reveals a new monster, Gyaos, named for the sounds he makes. It looks like a giant bat and has wind powers, which he uses to decimate the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

Gyaos is a formidable opponent, as he has beams that cancel out Gamera’s fire breath. He’s also willing to bite off his own toes to save himself from Gamera’s fierce fangs. It takes Gamera dragging Gyaos into one of those volcanoes to kill him.

This film presents a world where money is more important than the lives and needs of the poor, even in the face of a monster ready to kill all of them with no prejudice. Yes, Gamera vs. Gyaos remains a lesson for our time, even as it features men in rubber suits beating each other up.

You can watch this for free on Tubi and Vudu, or on YouTube below:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gappa, The Triphibian Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 24, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 15, 1969 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 25, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. It played as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet.

Gappa: The Triphibian Monster, initially released in the U.S. as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, is essentially Gorgo with monsters drawn from Japanese legend. That’s totally fine with me, because this movie is absolutely gorgeous.

Remarkably, this was the only giant monster movie the Nikkatsu studio produced. After this, it’s all Roman Porno and pinky violence.

An expedition from Tokyo heads to Obelisk Island — you know, just like Skull Island — where the president of Playmate Magazine, Mr. Funazu, wants to make a resort. The natives welcome them warmly until the forbidden zone is breached and the expedition takes a gappa egg with them. They plead that the egg’s parents will do anything to get it, and you know how humans act in Japanese kaiju films. That means that before you know it, we have two giant bird/turtle/lizard monsters going wild all over Japan to get their baby back.

This is a movie that could never be made today, because all of the natives of Obelisk Island are basically Japanese actors in blackface. Plus, the actions of the civilized people can additionally cause the Gappas to ignite the volcano and destroy every single villager except Sa, killing the men painted brown.

Speaking of racism, there was an urban legend that Nikkatsu’s international English translation had the line, “The monsters are attacking Tokyo. Fortunately, they are attacking the Negro section of town.” This is not true.

Akira Watanabe left Toho to work on the special effects for this movie. He’s known for finishing the designs of Baragon and King Ghidorah. There must not have been any bad blood, because he returned to serve as the art director for movies like King Kong Escapes, Son of Godzilla, and Prophecies of Nostradamus.