After the poetically beautiful ending of the second film in the Female Convict Scorpion series, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, this film starts with sheer violence. Matsu the Scorpion (Meiko Kaji) is wanted, with her face on every wall in the city, after leading a jailbreak. As she sits silently by herself as every newspaper around her shows that she is a dangerous fugitive, Detective Kondo and his partner notice her.

As they go to grab her, she pulls out her knife but she’s handcuffed to Kondo. However, the Scorpion will not be denied and she rushes out of the train car as the doors close. She hacks off the detective’s arm and runs through the streets, spraying the lawman’s blood everywhere.

Scorpion is back and woe to anyone that gets in her way.

There is one person willing to help Scorpion: Yuki, a prostitute who is abused on the streets and at home by her mentally deficient older brother. When they first meet, Scorpion is still stuck to that bloody arm, which later shows up in the mouth of a dog in a striking sequence.

Soon, she becomes Yuki’s defender in a world that is ready to take everything from her. All Matsu wants to do is be a seamstress and fade away, but her attack against a Yakuza member leads to her former prison mate Katsu recognizing her. This is where the series takes a turn for cartoonish, as his boss lady’s makeup, demeanor and dress suggest that she’s some demented Disney villainess, complete with an army of evil animals. She throws Matsu into a cage of deadly ravens, but she soon escapes and starts destroying Katsu’s gang, which brings back the one-armed Kondo, who wants personal and not just professional revenge.

This film deals with issues of motherhood and abortion, as both Yuki and another prostitute must both terminate their pregnancies. However, as the second woman dies as a result of her back alley surgery, her hand drops a blade into Scorpion’s hand. Director Shunya Ito cites Luis Bunuel as one of his favorite directors. Therefore, the recurring images of blades being pulled across the eyes in this series are homages to Un Chien Andalou. Whereas in the previous film, the old woman who faded into the leaves gave Scorpion all of her powers, here the dead prostitute’s gift of the blade unleashes the first tears we’ve seen our heroine shed. She is now more than just the destroyer of worlds. She is death incarnate, the black angel, the final defender of women who have lost everything.

In what he saw as the final film of the series — Kaji would return for one more — Shunya Ito wanted to create a world where all of the demon ghost stories of old Japan became true, such as the tale of Tsuna Watanabe cutting off a demon’s arm and the brother and sister in a forgotten village, whose incest was the only way they could support one another.

There’s a proto-Goodfellas sequence here where we follow Scorpion as she kills off everyone on her list, one by one, just as the camera follows the victims of Jimmy Conway to cover up the Lufthansa heist. Bodies are left in the streets, in movie theaters, in car washes and in one striking sequence, Scorpion slashes a man in front of an entire wall of wanted posters bearing her name. The kills come quickly and brutally, with no need to set up time or place. We are in the poetic world of art now and her art is death. She even appears from mirrors, saying that she has been possessed by the spirit of the dead girl before unleashing a raven that attacks a man and sends him flying through a glass window.

Scorpion then runs from the police, across rooftops and dodging searchlights before being cornered by an army of officers. She takes to the sewers, as man after man is sent down, each dying by her hand. As Scorpion goes deeper into these watery passages, the camerawork becomes more claustrophobic.

All these men with their toys, like bulletproof vests, SCUBA gear, boats and submachine guns. And all our heroine has is her knife.

Yuki finally runs to the streets, after her brother takes her one more time, and the rains wash the sewers, ruining the hiding place. Scorpion won’t give up. She can’t. Yuki feeds her friend but is discovered by the detective, who abuses her with a roomful of men in full armor who beat her with wooden swords and threatens to keep her so that her brother will starve.

The end of this movie is beyond perfect. After setting the sewers ablaze and Kondo laughing like a maniac — this movie has a Die Hard fireball 16 years before that movie came out — everyone’s life moves on as if Scorpion were dead. Or is she? We see Yuki bruised and back in her brother’s arms before the blazing waters of the underground are broken by Scorpion rising from the water like some sort of ghost.

As a result of her dealings with Detective Kondo, Katsu is in jail, her face pale but no longer sporting her distinctive makeup. Yet you can tell that she’s in power, even behind bars.

Then a new prisoner shows up for a short three-month sentence. Katsu becomes convinced that this woman is Scorpion. Even when Kondo comes to the prison to either clean up loose ends or question Katsu further, he shows up at her cell just as she’s convinced that Scorpion is about to kill her. She ends up killing the detective as a woman mops the floor. As Kondo struggles and demands she sound an alarm, the woman looks up and it’s Scorpion. She locks eyes with him as he dies.

Finally, all of the wanted posters are ablaze as Scorpion’s theme plays one last time. We end on her face. She should be happy now that her mission of vengeance is over and she can rest. But no — all we get are her eyes staring at us.

I can’t even explain how life changing this movie is. Rush to find it, watch it and be changed by it.

You can watch this on Shudder or go all in and buy the Arrow Video box set at Diabolik DVD.

I always try to think about what movies I’d show together if I did a theme night at a theater. Warlock Moon is the kind of 1970’s weirdness that would pair well with 1972’s Terror House, a cannibal comedy that predates The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for its depiction of a family that eats human beings together.

You may know Laurie Walters from Eight Is Enough, but around here, she’s a bit more celebrated for being in the 1972 made-for-TV movie The People, which also has Kim Darby and an incredulous William Shatner, shocked that kids can fly. Here, she plays Jenny Macallister, a college student who follows John Devers, a journalist played by Joe Spano (who is probably known to TV lovers as Lt. Henry Goldblume on Hill Street Blues and FBI Special Agent Tobias C. Fornell on NCIS), to a strange house in the countryside that seems to appear and disappear.

Shot under the title Devil’s Feast, this movie was lensed at the Soda Spring Spa, which was originally the Arroyo Del Valle Sanatorium, a treatment center for tuberculosis, which had been vacant for an entire decade before the movie was filmed.

Interestingly enough, on the Media Blasters DVD, Joe Bob Briggs claims that Tobe Hooper caught wind of the movie while he was finalizing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and he made a special trip to California fearing that the movies were too similar. They may be story-wise, but the tone is wildly different.

This is the kind of movie where not much happens until the last few minutes, as it all feels trapped in a hazy ’70s drug world. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not the kind of pace that most people today are able to get into. For those that love it, this is exactly what you’re looking for. For example, this is the kind of movie that Rob Zombie has tried to make around ten times.

You can buy the Code Red release of this movie at Ronin Flix.

After Tales from the Crypt, where else can you go? The Haunt of Fear? How about The Vault of Horror? Roy Ward Baker was also the director of Asylum, Scars of Dracula and The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, so that makes him absolutely perfect for this one. Strangely, none of these stories appeared in The Vault of Horror comic book. They all come from Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories.

Five strangers ride an elevator to the basement of an office building where they reach a mysterious basement room that looks like a gentlemen’s club. There’s no exit, so they get drinks and each man shares the nightmare they’ve been dreading every night.

Midnight Mess originally appeared in Tales from the Crypt #35. Harold Rodgers (Daniel Massey) and his sister Donna (real-life siblings Daniel and Anna Massey) reunited in a strange village where brother kills sister over the family’s estate. But later, as he dines out, he realizes that this is a town of vampires and his sister isn’t as deceased as he believed. The last frame of this scene is absolutely perfect!

The Neat Job comes from Shock SuspenStories #1 and concerns Terry-Thomas being an old bachelor with OCD who finally marries his trophy wife, Eleanor (Glynis Johns, who was much later in life the grandmother in While You Were Sleeping). His constant prissy orders and need for perfection drive her crazy and she puts all of his organs into nicely labelled jars. Becca has threatened to do this to me so many times that I changed my Driver’s License so that she gets my organs instead of someone else.

This Trick’ll Kill You first appeared in Tales from the Crypt #33. Sebastian (Curt Jürgens, The Mephisto Waltz) is a magician on vacation in India looking for new tricks for himself and his wife Inez (Dawn Addams, The Countess from The Vampire Lovers). He’s also ready to steal and kill to get ahead. The conclusion to this one isn’t quite as gory as the comic story but is much creepier as blood just comes out the ceiling, hinting that something really brutal has just happened.

Bargain in Death comes from Tales from the Crypt #28 and is all about an insurance scam and graverobbers, as well as double crosses and outright murder.

Drawn and Quartered was in Tales from the Crypt #26 and is the final story. A painter living in Haiti — played by Tom Baker! —  discovers that he may be poor, but his paintings are selling for top dollar thanks to art dealers Diltant (Denholm Elliott) and Gaskill (John Witty) after art critic Fenton Breedley (Terence Alexander) makes his work the talk of the art scene. It turns out they all conspired to keep him hungry while they benefitted from his work, so he gets voodoo power in his painting hand and paints the three men, then destroys them. For some reason, he also painted himself and when that canvas gets covered with paint thinner, things get ugly.

Finally, all of the men walk into a graveyard and disappear, while Sebastian the magician stays behind in the room before he goes away, too.

This is the only Amicus portmanteau without Peter Cushing, who was filming And Now the Screaming Starts! while this film was in production. This is Amicus at the height of their powers, however, and this is a film worth owning. You can get it — and Tales from the Crypt — as a two blu ray set from Shout! Factory.

This movie may look like an Amicus movie, but make no mistake. It isn’t. But I can’t blame anyone that thinks that it is, thanks to its cast and director, Freddie Francis. Its wraparound story is all mental hospital, where Dr. Tremayne (Donald Pleasence) tells Dr. Nicholas (Jack Hawkins, Theater of Blood) about four very special cases and how he solved them.

In the first story, Mr. Tiger, a young boy imagines a new best friend, a talking tiger. His parents argue constantly, so he uses that friend to try and escape.

The second tale — that witnesses madness — is Penny Farthing. Here, an antique store owner Timothy inherits an odd portrait and a penny farther bicycle from his aunt and uncle. Soon, he travels through time and romancing an earlier love interest of his uncle who looks exactly like his girlfriend in our time. That’s because they’re both played by Suzy Kendall (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage).

Mel, the third part of this film, concerns found object art that a man falls in love with, ignoring his wife Bella (Joan Collins!). Obviously, this man is a complete moron.

Finally, Luau is about a literary agent (Kim Novak, Vertigo) whose daughter is menaced by an author and his associate who plan on serving her daughter for dinner as an “earth pig.” Novak replaced Rita Heyworth, who was originally going to be in this part of the film.

Finally, the story is wrapped up when Dr. Nicholas tries to lock up Dr. Tremayne for being as insane as his patients. He’s soon eaten by the invisible tiger from earlier. Yep. That really happens.

Sadly, Jack Hawkins died soon after this movie wrapped due to complications from a surgery that was to give him an experimental voicebox. His dialogue is dubbed here by Charles Grey, the narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

There are a few fun moments here, but if you haven’t enjoyed a British portmanteau horror before, this probably isn’t the one to start with.

The beauty of a Mill Creek box set is that amidst the dross, there are films of incredible power. Sure, you’ll suffer through old television shows, barely incomprehensible Spanish horror and video store era throwaway junk, but then you’ll be rewarded with a film like this. Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones  wait to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic of levels, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead, where an entire town slowly becomes the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, to begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality. This is a transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with the return of the blockbuster, with Jaws and Star Wars. In a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Grafitti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that the Chilling Classics set was sold in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume, it finds the right people. It discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost.

The absolutely amazing art for this article is by Francine Spiegel and can be purchased at Exhibition A. And we love this movie so much, we reviewed it two more times: Doc from Camera Viscera reviewed it as part of our Mill Creek “Chilling Classics Month” HERE and we discussed it as part of our 2017 podcasting schedule HERE, and you can listen to Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum discuss this movie with Becca below.

You can also listen to the commentary track that Bill and Sam did for this movie here:

The Bride was once called just that — a title that makes a lot more sense. But after Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, we got a plethora of movies renamed to seem close to that film, even if they’re nothing like it at all. Like this one — which is about when you start getting weirded out by how your new wife seems like a borderline insane daddy’s girl, the best choice of action is to not bang a bridesmaid on your wedding day.

That’s exactly what David does. But he’s just a part of Barbara’s dream life: a perfect house that daddy just for her and a perfect man to fill it. There are a bunch of match cuts that show her kiss her new husband just like she kisses daddy, so if you’re starting to feel weirded out, stick around.

David decides to hook up with his old girlfriend Helen on his wedding day, which is in the very house that his wife has made for them. Barbara stabs the old flame with scissors, walks out in a blood-strewn wedding gown past all her guests and disappears.

David then does what anyone else would. He moves his new girlfriend into the house and keeps working for Barbara’s dad, who has a friendly meeting with him with no anger at all. Well, he does relate a story about how his daughter used to enjoy cutting the heads off of chickens as a child. Of course, a chicken head is soon in the bed he should have shared with his wife. Trust me, things are only going to get worse.

Also, it’s going to get much weirder. I mean it. This is a legitimately strange film. It’s not like Wes Craven, whose film inspired the retitling of this. With his films, I often see an academic studying weird people and making a film versus real weird people who gathered together to make a movie that confounds you on every level.

Those strange people are John Grissmer (who also did another weird movie, Blood Rage, which features Last House on Dead End Street/The Bride as the movie playing in the drive-in that starts the film) and Jean-Marie Pélissié, who only directed this singular movie. This is the kind of strange magic that could only come from the early 1970’s. And much like another freakout from that decade, The Baby, this movie is also rated PG.

You can watch this for free with your Amazon Prime subscription.

Released with The Witch Who Came from the Sea and The Premonition as part of Arrow Video’s American Horror Film Project, this movie is all about the Norris family looking for their lost son who got lost at an evil carnival. As a cover, they get jobs working in the carnival. And then things go wrong…

The carnival’s manager, Mr. Blood, is a vampire. Go figure, with a name like that. Meanwhile, the evil owner Malatesta is in charge of an entire army of goons who watch silent movies and eat human flesh. Hervé Villechaize from TV’s Fantasy Island is one of them.

After directing this movie, Christopher Eric Speeth went on to work in documentaries. This film is, well, a mess. You’re never sure when something is a flashback or a dream; things appear in a fuzzy multicolored haze, much like you’ve been staying up all night doing drugs and listening to overly loud jam bands. I’m not saying I don’t like it. I’m just trying to tell you how it is.

If your idea of a good time is watching people do autopsies while singing show tunes, then you’re on the right spectrum for this one. Want to see it for yourself? It’s on Shudder.