Deaf Crocodile Films, in association with distribution partner Seagull Films and with restoration from the original camera negative by Mosfilm Studio, has created a new restoration of famed Russian fantasy filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko’s Skazka O Tsare Saltane.

Adapted from the Alexander Pushkin fairy tale, this movie is beyond gorgeous.

Driven from the Russian court by her evil sisters while Tsar Saltan (Vladimir Andreyev) is at war with cannibal trolls, Tsarina (Larisa Golubkina) and her infant son Prince Gvidon are tossed in a cask and launched into stormy seas. Somehow, her son (Oleg Vidov) has grown to adulthood and helps them to make it to an island where he falls in love with a human swan — a wereswan? — princess (Kseniya Ryabinkina) while dreaming of seeing his father again. So he asks the swan to transform him into an insect so he may spy on the evil sisters and learn how he and his mother can finally return to their home.

This is a movie filled with sheer magic, like a town trapped in time that must be rescued, monstrous sea giants, lion statues that come to life and a singing squirrel that is a puppet that will warm even the coldest  of hearts. The fact that this movie is now coming out in the U.S. and can be streamed and purchased on blu ray is the kind of miracle that shows that we are truly in the golden age of physical media.

Deaf Crocodile has already released two other Ptushko films, Ilya Muromets (The Sword & the Dragon) and Sampo (The Day the Earth Froze). They’ve described his work as a combination of Walt Disney, Ray Harryhausen and Mario Bava, which sounds too fantastic but I can assure you is completely true. If you’re wondering if you’ve heard of this creative force, he co-wrote Viy.

You can get The Tale of Tsar Saltan from Deaf Crocodile. It features a newhour-long video interview with legendary visual effects artist and film historian Robert Skotak on Aleksandr Ptushko and the history of Soviet fantastika filmmaking, moderated by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile Films, a new commentary track by comics artist (Swamp Thing), film historian and author Stephen R. Bissette, a new essay by film historian and professor Peter Rollberg (Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema) and box art by Tony Stella.

Based on the Edgar Wallace novel The Blue Hand and part of a long-running series of krimi adaptations by Rialto Film, this was bought by New World Pictures and issued as a double feature in the U.S. with Beast of the Yellow Night. Man, how good was life then?

Klaus Kinski plays Dave Emerson, who chokes out a nurse and escapes from a mental hospital before running to the castle of his twin brother Richard — also Kinski — as a black robed killer roams the grounds and kills people with his astounding blue claw with razorblades on the fingers, like something out of a giallo. For example, oh, Death Walks at Midnight. Or A Nightmare On Elm Street, which came 17 years after this.

Director Alfred Vohrer keeps things moving and it all looks gorgeous if indebted to Mario Bava. That said, aren’t all movies made after him? There’s also an incredible insane asylum sequence, featuring rooms filled with mice, rats and one female patient who just strips all day and night. This is the kind of movie world where you just want to live inside it, except that, yeah, there’s a killer on the loose and the cops are as always ineffectual.

Coming out just three years before giallo would surpass the krimi while using many of the same ideas from Edgar Wallace, this film reminds me that I need to get deeper into watching these German detective movies.

Creature With the Blue Hand later re-edited in 1987 with new gore inserts by producer Sam Sherman for his company Independent International — wow, I love that so much — and released to home video as The Bloody Dead. The extra scenes — almost ten minutes of new footage — was directed by Warren F. Disbrow and his father Warren Disbrow Sr.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 24, 2020.

Happy holidays, everyone. To help celebrate, this is the first of two very horrifying holiday options for you to watch. Despite Santa being in the title of this movie, he only briefly appears, but that isn’t why we watched this movie. No, we’re here because this is another film in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis that we had to check off.

Yes, parents that dropped their kids off at the theater for an all-day matinee in 1967 probably had no idea that just a few years earlier, the man they are trusting with the psyches of their children made Blood Feast.

So how did this even happen? Well, producer J. Edwin Baker was also a spook-show performer known as Dr. Silkini — his act was The Asylum of Horrors — and he hired Lewis to make a movie for his friend magician Roy Huston.

Huston plays Merlin, making this the second baffling holiday movie* I’ve seen where Santa joins forces with King Arthur’s closest confidant. I have no idea why this is a thing, to be perfectly honest.

The film starts with Santa Claus chilling out on the day after Christmas by reading some Mother Goose, which puts him to sleep. This section is tacked on, of course, to the original film so that they could get more money out of it. It’s also so shoddily made that we can audibly hear Lewis yell cut.

As for the movie itself, Old King Cole calls Merlin, a rag doll who is legally never referred to as Raggedy Anne (or Annabelle, for that matter), Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose and a ghost who they originally called Casper before an audio edit saved the production from a lawsuit onto the stage for singing, something resembling dancing and the kind of magic tricks that you could have bought from a mail order store to bore your friends with.

Do you remember — if you’re a jerk like me — how much you hated up with people school assemblies? This is just like being stuck at one of those, with Lewis just plopping his cameras down and shooting whatever happened on stage.

There’s so much hand work and goofy acting tics and a witch that gets set on fire and not Raggedy Ann is just horrifying and the real magic trick is that somehow the hour running time of this feels like a hundred years. But hey, it’s Christmas and I have pledged to watch everything the Godfather of Gore ever did, so if you’re going to hit the highs of She-Devils on Wheels and Two Thousand Maniacs! then you’re going to suffer the valleys on the journey.

*The other is, of course, the Mexican mind melter known as Santa Claus.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on September 6, 2020. It returns thanks to a Kino Lorber blu ray reissue, featuring a 2012 2K restoration, new audio commentary by novelist/critic Kim Newman and writer/editor Stephen Jones and the trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

When you mention 1960’s British horror films, most people are going to think of Hammer. Or Amicus. But there’s also Tigon, the very small studio who could, and by could, I mean make some astoundingly strange movies.

Witchfinder General, The Curse of the Crimson Altar, The Blood on Satan’s Claw…these are the movies that make me think that England in 1967 was an insane place to be.

Vernon Sewell directed this thriller about young and good looking men having their throats torn open and drained by a killer so frightening that whomever it is has driven the last eyewitness mad, claiming that a horrible winged creature with huge eyes is the killer.

Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) responds by thinking that a giant eagle — no, not the Pittsburgh-based grocery store — has to be the murderer.

If this development has you happy, then good news. This is the kind of stiff upper lip British low budget fun you’re looking for. Yes, I struggled to include this in either the werewolf or vampire weeks we’re planning because it features a weremoth who lives on human blood. A weremoth! What will they think of next!?!

Cushing considered this the worst of his many films. Scanning his vast resume should tell you just how low this must be, but he was acting in as many films as he could to pay for the care of his wife Helene, who was suffering from emphysema. She would die four years later and by all accounts, he never recovered.

This played on double bills with the 1962 Italian film Slaughter of the Vampires.

The thing about so much of early erotic films — particularly the work of Joe Sarno, who directed and wrote this — is how so many of the stories end in sheer despair. Is that the square-up reel hanging like the Sword of Damocles hung by a thread over the lovemaking so that we feel morally superior by the end of our voyeurism?

Inside a New York apartment building lives divorced rich mother Fletcher (Melissa Ford, The Roommate) and her shy daughter Wendy (Gretchen Rudolph, My Body Hungers), who ends up at one of those swinging free love parties that I am certain only exist in Joe Sarno movies, one where Barbara introduces her to a sordid world of sin, all to somehow steal money from Pam’s mom, thanks to the schemes of Billy, who says that he’s an artist, but I think he’s some kind of asshole. Yet Billy falls for mom, while Hank, a sadist who Wendy keeps blowing off, starts to grow enraged.

Angelique Pettyjohn, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island) is also in this black and white film, a movie that seems where everyone wants something — love, sex, money — and everyone fails at finding it.

This is another example of films that Cannon would bring to America, get into art theaters and make a quick buck. More than a few years later, it would become the Cannon we know and love, but everyone starts somewhere.

Also known as Violent Love, this is the first movie ever produced by Cannon.

Directed by Rudi Dorn and an uncredited John Gaisford, this movie finds drug dealer Walter Dorland (Paul Negri) fighting with his wife Margaret (Joan Armstrong) over her threatening to turn him itnto the police, so he visits a hypnotist named Korba (Peter Adamson), who hypnotizes Miklos (Noel Beckett) to assault and kill his wife while she stays at the couple’s cabin for the weekend.

I list this here for its historical importance, seeing as how this is an example of how Cannon took European exploitation, released it in the U.S. and made money. At this time in our history, a roughie like this was the absolute height of decadence. One imagines it could play on TV today.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of Jess Franco Month, these movies were on the site on February 15 of this year. Now, Vinegar Syndrome is releasing them as only they can, newly scanned and restored in 4K from their 35mm original camera negatives. Beyond English and German langauge tracks, there;s also an alternate feature-length extended Spanish versions for both films (sourced from tape with newly translated English subtitles). Plus, Franco expert Stephen Thrower is interviewed about both movies, there are two archival Franco interviews and trailers and still galleries for both movies.

Also known as Sadist Erotica, The Case of the Two Beauties, Two Avenging Angels and Red Lips Sadisterotica, this mindblast from Jess Franco is kinda sorta a Eurospy movie, but you get the feeling that Mr. Franco just wants to get to the choking and nudity and whipping and forget whatever minor plot there is.

Basically: two lesbian detectives are trying to find criminals, so they themselves pose as a supercriminal named Red Lips (this goes back to Franco’s 1960 movie, Red Lips, which was before Bondmania). The police have no idea and the tone of the films go from swinging fun and humor to outright brutality with no warning whatsoever.

I have no idea if I can explain what happens in this movie, which starts with an attractive brunette — Franco loved his brunettes, so get ready — being ripped to shreds by a werewolf man while a rich guy named Klaus Thiller watches and paints it all.

Then Red Lips steals a painting and we learn that the two lesbians, the blonde Regina (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love) and redhead Diana (Janine Reynaud, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) wear the mask and outfit when it suits them.

So yeah. The girls get hired to find someone that Thiller probably killed, they sleep with every man around them and yet still wind up with one another. Also: every few minutes, just when things threaten to get boring, there’s a go go dancing scene filled with nudity and blaring music.

This movie made no sense and I loved it for that reason.

Regina (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love) and Diana (Janine Reynaud, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) are back again for the third Red Lips movie from Jess Franco.

If the last film — Two Undercover Angels — made no sense, guess what? This one doubles down, almost a stream of consciousness film made up of murders, jazz clubs, stripteases, our girls play saxophones and near-escapes.

The sell copy for this claims, “Stiffs, Satanists and Sapphic sadists all after a secret formula for human clones!”

Maybe it’s the fact that I watched Jess Franco movies one after another and pounded what’s left of my brain into putty, but I loved every single minute of this movie.

Also known as Castle of the Doomed, it feels like Franco ran out of ideas here and just decided to have more things happen to the point that continuity and plot became the contrivances that lesser people try to bring up as necessary elements for a movie.

Nope. Not to Jess Franco.

Knife throwing clones? Evil lesbians? Good lesbians? Satanic murderers? Yeah. It’s got all that and an ending that doesn’t solve anything.

The failure of this movie would bring an end to the girls’ adventures until 1999’s Red Silk, although you can perhaps consider Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties a spiritual side quest.

But I think you should only watch a few Jess Franco movies in a row if you want to survive. And my head is already throbbing.

Also note: Two Undercover Angels had a monster in it. Kiss Me Monster has no monster.

Somewhere in there is a koan that will change your life.