Man, if you’re looking for a British seance movie — and really who isn’t — there’s not a better film for you than this 1972 bit of craziness. Sir Hugo Cunningham’s (Robert Stephens) idea of fun is to film the last moments of peoples’ lives and seeing if a smudge in the images are the soul of the body trying to escape. Man, Victorian England was daffy.

Things get crazier, because when he uses a camera at the party for his engagement, his new fiancée and son are killed in a boating accident. When he watches the movie he made of the tragedy — because why not, right? — he sees that not only has he captured the blur, but that it is moving towards his son. That’s when he starts to believe that these smudges and blurs are something he calls the asphyx, the grim reaper from Greek myth that individually comes for each of us.

Now here’s where things get even more interesting. Because our hero figures that the asphyx must deal with the rules of the physical world. So he invents a special light that uses phosphorus stones beneath a drip irrigation valve that can briefly capture that smudgy black angel, making anyone who keeps asphyx remained imprisoned into an immortal.

Cunningham tasks his ward — how rich and British and Batman do you have to be to get a ward — Giles (Robert Powell) with capturing his asphyx and burying it deep in a family tomb. Because after all, Cunningham’s contributions to science are just too important for him to ever die. They need to bring in another person, Giles’ stepsister (and fiancee, because this is high society England) Christina for help. If they help him become an immortal, he will consent to them getting married.

Nothing works out well for anyone, save perhaps the guinea pig that can’t die. He’s doomed to wander the Earth with an immortal Cunningham, all the way to modern London as seen at the end of this movie.

The Asphyx is a movie that feels like a hard sell to an American crowd. It’s kind of staid and nuanced, but the effects are pretty wild and the idea is definitely high concept.

This is the only movie directed by Peter Newbrook, who also wrote Gonks Go Beat, produced Corruption (which no woman will dare go home alone after watching) and worked on the second unit on Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai.

If you watch this in the U.S., know that as of now, you can’t see a high quality version. Every version of this movie — so far — has footage mastered from the 35mm negative mixed with footage mastered from a print of inferior quality, which means that the movie’s quality is constantly shifting. That said, the asphyx itself looks awesome and the story is enough to keep you watching.

Tim Ochopee (Chris Robinson, who would write, direct and star in 1975’s The Intruder) is a war damaged Seminole just back from Vietnam that wants to live out the rest of his life in the Everglades with his snake Stanley. He didn’t count on Richard Thomkins (Alex Rocco), a maker of leather goods with mob ties, killing his father. Now, all the snakes that Tim has lived with will be the death of everyone who has done him wrong.

Only Grefe could take a ripoff of Willard and somehow make it more disturbing than you’d expect. Yes, this is a movie packed with snakes doing all manner of damage to people and people doing just as horrible things to them, including an exotic dancer playing a geek and biting the head off one on stage as she dances seductively with blood all over her bare chest.

Of course, Tim has to kill everyone in the way and kidnap Thomkin’s daughter Susie (Susan Caroll), but any hope of true love kind of goes the way that you’d expect in a Florida regional horror film that doesn’t stop with just stealing from one film and moves into being a reptile-obsessed Billy Jack.

That said — for a movie so much about protecting snakes, the actual snakes in this movie were defanged and some had their mouths sewn shut. There’s enough human on snake violence in this that you’d expect that it was made in Italy. Grefe still owns the wallet that they made out of the skin of the main snake that played Stanley, which is pretty weird when you dwell on it as much as I have.

Gary Crutcher wanted to do a sequel called Stanley in Miami, but it didn’t happen. He wrote this on two days under the influence of amphetamines, which is the most Florida thing you can say about a movie that is the most Sunshine State movie I’ve seen.

Visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, The Tree of Life, The Towering Inferno) finally got the chance to direct with this movie and sadly, he didn’t get to capitalize on it

Made for one million dollars, one-tenth the budget of Kubrick’s classic, this movie was helped by all the special effects know-how of Trumbull, who was not originally going to direct it. Lead actor Bruce Dern stated that Trumbull’s creative vision was equal to Alfred Hitchcock, who he had also worked with. And that made the director hot for the briefest of times, as it flopped at the box office.

Trumbull joked “It was just a great experience for me as a filmmaker, but I didn’t know that I was part of an experiment by Universal Studios…to see if it was possible to have a movie survive on word of mouth alone without an advertising campaign.*”

At some point in the future, all that is left of Earth’s ecosystem is floating in space. The crew is ordered to destroy the greenery by the faceless bureaucrats that run what is left of the world and they comply, all save Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern, The ‘Burbs, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, Coming Home), who has taken three service robots and gone into “silent running” around the rings of Saturn, keeping himself as sane as he can and what is left of Earth’s once lush forests blooming.

Written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino (the two would go on to write The Deer Hunter and Cimino would spectacularly self-destruct with Heaven’s Gate) and Steven Bochco (who would go on to create L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and more), this is a quiet tale of a man whose only companions are the industrial droids he renames Huey, Dewey and Louie**.

The effects in this movie are obviously the draw. The ship Valley Forge was reused on the show Battlestar Galactica years later and still held up as a great looking spaceship, even post-Star Wars. And the haunting soundtrack was by Peter Schickele, better known for doing classical music parodies under the name of P.D.Q. Bach.

Without this movie, we’d have no Mystery Science Theater 3000, as the idea of a man lost in space with only robots to talk to resonated with creator Joel Hodgson. And speaking of inspiration, Trumbull was asked by George Lucas to work on this movie, but passed. Lucas asked if he could use a droid in his film inspired by the robots in Silent Running and Trumbull agreed. Six years later, when 20th Century-Fox sued Universal, claiming that Battlestar Galactica was a ripoff of Star Wars, Universal countersued with the theory that Star Wars ripped off Silent Running.

The Arrow Video release of this film has everything you ever wanted on this film and more. There’ a new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, approved by Trumbull that was created exclusively for this release. Plus, you get a new commentary track by critics Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw and one from Trumbull and Dern. There are also features with film music historian Jeff Bond on the film’s score, Jon Spira exploring the screenplay and Dern on his work in the movie. Plus, the artwork is by Aric Roper, who did the art for Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” album.

This was a film I searched for most my childhood, as we couldn’t just grab a DVD or stream films back then. I always saw photos of it in Starlog and wondered what the robots would look like when they moved.

You can get Silent Running from Arrow Video, who were nice enough to send us a review copy.

*Actually, this really was part of a Universal Studios experiment to try and recreate Easy Rider by giving a million dollars or less to young filmmakers and letting them have final cut. The other films are Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, Hopper’s The Last Movie, Forman’s Taking Off and Lucas’ American Graffiti.

**The three drones were played by four bilateral amputees (Mark Person as Dewey, Cheryl Sparks and Steven Brown (he’s also in the biker mover J.C.) as Huey and Larry Whisenhunt as Louie). That means they are either missing both arms or both legs. This was inspired by sideshow performer Johnny Eck. Also, in Italy, the drones are named after Paperino, Paperone and Paperina (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and Daisy Duck) because the names for Huey, Dewey and Louie in Italy are Quim, Quo and Qua. Therefore, calling them would have sounding like this; “Vieni qui, Qui,” which would be pretty weird, right?

Unfortunately, Trumbull’s directing efforts didn’t fare much better with 1983’s Brainstorm.

Westchester County played host to a veritable army of maniacs, including Ed Adlum (Shriek of the Mutilated), the FIndlays (Snuff) and Ed Kelleher (Prime Evil), who were armed with a camera, $24,000, some stage blood and cases of beer to pay off the cast. The result is a movie that seems like it could fit in with Motel Hell at first before you realize that these farmers are druids out to raise their queen from the dead with the blood of the stupid.

These Sangroids are bringing back Queen Onhorrid and they won’t let anyone stand in their way and that includes puppies. It’s a movie that doesn’t care if it’s shot in the day, the night or day for night. It is also relentlessly devoted to being weird without being a try hard movie. This is just plain weird.

Throw in an atonal soundtrack, the chunkiest blood you’ve ever seen and a woman in a glass case who gets to come back from the beyond and rule for all of 45 seconds and you have a movie.

If you watched Manos: The Hands of Fate and were hoping to find something just as odd and as poorly realized, this would be the spiritual East Coast sequel that you crave. If anyone else wrote that sentence, it would be a put-down. Coming out of my typing fingers, it’s the highest of compliments.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

Yılmaz Atadeniz made eighty films or more between 1963 and 1997, amongst them Spy Smasher, several of the Kilink movies, Super Salami and Special Squad Shoots on Sight, which is all about a hypnotist cop forced to work with the mob.

Welcome to Turkey, people.

Thanks to Stomp Tokyo, I have learned that this is a Turkish remake of the 1940 Republic serial The Mysterious Doctor Satan, a movie that nobody was asking for. Well guess what? I, for one, am glad this got made.

Our hero Tekin is investigating some murders when his adopted father — well, he doesn’t know the adjective just yet — tells him that his real father was The Copperhead, who was killed by Doctor Satan, making this seem like a Silver Age update. Moments after this happens, Satan’s henchman kills the secretary and Tekin’s once adoptive, now deceased father. He had two dads, Doctor Satan, and you killed them both!

This may be easier said than done, because the evil physcian has perhaps the most ridiculous man-crushing robot ever made in his employ.

Remember how it was a big deal when the reissue of Shriek of the Mutilated put Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” back in once the song was cleared for music rights? Turkish directors have no idea what that means, so that song is all over this movie, as it rightly should be. I doubt they paid Henry Mancini for “The Pink Panther” theme either.

The star of this movie, Kunt Tulgar, said that Doctor Satan’s robot was supposed to be human until the skin on his arm would be ripped off in a fight scene, revealing machine parts 12 years before The Terminator and a year before Westworld. That said, they didn’t have the money for that and decided to go with a cardboard suit.

Mondo Macabro released this on a double DVD with Tarkan vs. the Vikings. So if you see a strange man prowling your used video store seeking Turkish reisues, say hello. That’s me.

Translated as Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder, this 1972 Turkish film is basically Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh in an hour and with a different ending. I was astounded to learn that this movie existed, much less be able to find it. For all the horrible things you say about the internet and social media — if you do — remember that we live in a world where somehow I can now easily find Turkish remixes of Italian movies that only absolute maniacs like me are obsessed over.

Director Mehmet Aslan also made the astounding Tarkan and the Blood of the Vikings, a movie that equally has me baffled and compelled. He also made Lionman II: The Witchqueen, the sequel to Kiliç Aslan, which we know here as The Sword and the Claw.

Mine (Meral Zeren) is married to Metin (Nihat Ziyalan), but she can’t escape the sexual feelings that arise when she remembers the brutal way that Tarik (Yildirim Gencer, Kilink from Kilink: Strip and Kill) used to make love to her. Of course, Meral Zeren is no Edwige Fenech and Yildirim Gencer is no Ivan Rassimov, but that’s the very definition of a tall order. Also that sentence may be the deepest film comment I have ever made and I realize that no one in my life outside of my fellow obsessives will get it. Such is life. Such is Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder.

Mine’s best friend Oya (Eva Bender, who was Gosha the Sorceress in Tarkan: The Gold Medallion) is the Caroll character, introducing our heroine to a new lover, Yilmaz (Kadir Inanir), who would be George Hilton for those playing at home.

There’s also a giallo-style straight razor-wielding killer, in case you were wondering. Yet even though you’ve seen this movie before, you really haven’t seen this movie before. Turkish movies are trips to the wavy mirror in a funhouse, presenting the familiar while distorting it in ways that make you see things that you adore in a whole new way.