EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie originally was on our site on March 16, 2021. Now, Kino Lorber has released it on blu ray with a 2K scan of the uncut Director’s Edition — featuring the legendary thought-to-be-lost fourth story involving a creepy tree witch — as well as an interview with star Gil Glasgow and a theatrical trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Screams of a Winter Night is a regional movie inspired by regional movies. Director James L. Wilson had played Santa Claus in the Disney movie Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx before getting inspired by the movies that Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek) and Joy Houck (Creature from Black Lake) made. It has that hallmark of the regional film, a producer who was really a guy with some cash that never made a movie before, in this case, Mark Lovell, who was a real estate agent. And a local named William T. Cherry III made the special effects.

This movie does what Are You Afraid of the Dark? did for several seasons on Nickelodeon. A bunch of young people sit around a campfire telling stories, forming an effective anthology story that moves well and keeps you interested.

But man, what is really wrong with the characters in this movie? They go to John’s family’s cabin, which before that had belonged to the Durand family, who who weren’t just mysteriously killed at the cabin, they were found in pieces all over the place, possibly murdered by a demon called the Shataba. Why would you stay there after hearing this?

Made in Shreveport, Louisiana and premiering there, this movie feels like urban legends come to life, like the “Moss Point Man” that attacks a couple on lover’s lane, the “Green Light” that drives three college* fraternity kids mad and the story of a girl driven to insanity by a date rape.

The final story makes one of the girls frantic and before you know it, the wind has blows a window out and kills one of the girls before only four of the kids escape as the cabin crashes down. They run to the edge of a cliff and then they hear a howling behind them.

The Kino Lorber release of Screams of a Winter Night includes the director’s cut of the film that runs two hours and has one more story of people being chased by a witch through a graveyard. Dimension Pictures — the people that put out Ruby, Return to Boggy Creek and Scum of the Earth — told the filmmakers that two hours was too long for the movie and that all the day-for-night footage wouldn’t show up well on drive-in screens.

This is a movie that sets up a really ominous mood from the very start. I appreciate that and love this movie because it feels like it was made by people who were excited at the prospect of creation instead of just commerce.

*This was shot at Caspari Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisian. Its now abandoned and said to be haunted.

Wei Chung is a newcomer to prison and immediately starts fighting with Ma Siu Tien, a one eyed old man who is his cellmate. The Ma Siu Tien repeatedly defeats him and on the night before he’s to be executed, he gives the young man half of a medal, telling him that there’s a great secret if he can find he other half. Can Wei Chung escape prison and discover the secret? Or will he be stopped by Tung Hei Fung?

Now chained to another inmate named Zhou, Wei Chun soon learns that the man, who he once saw as a nobody, has the other half of the key to the treasure, which contains all of the secrets of monkey boxing.

Director Lo Mar mainly worked on comedies for the Shaw Brothers, like the Country Bumpkins series. There’s a wild fight on a bed when Wei Chun refuses to pay a woman what she’s worth in a brothel, a scene that never leaves the bed. I haven’t seen that in a martial arts movie before!

Known as Hooray the Bonebreakers Are Here in Germany and Stroke of Death in the U.S., Monkey Kung Fu and Drunken Monkey, this also has an incredible final battle with amazing staff fighting against the drunken monkey boxing style.

88 Films has just released Monkey Kung Fu on blu ray with a high definition 1080p presentation of the film, along with English and Cantonese dialogue with newly translated English subtitles. There’s also audio commentary by Kenneth Brorsson and Phil Gillon of the Podcast On Fire Network, an interview with choreographer Tony Leung Siu-hung, a trailer and new artwork by Robert “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien. The packaging is amazing and also comes with a poster and lobby cards. You can get this movie from MVD and Diabolik DVD.

In 1975, Jess Franco was shooting a remake of his 1969 film, De Sade’s Justine. But as these things happen, he ran out of money and all he had to show for it was a few sex scenes starring his obsession, Lina Romay.

So the producers of this film thought long and, well, hard and decided that only one person could save this movie and make it something releasable. And sleazy. And they decided to seek out the one man who could potentially out perv Jess Franco.

Ladies (who am I kidding) and gentlemen, Joe D’Amato.

Justine (Romay) is a stripper in love with a songwriter who can’t deal with her need for sex from anyone at any time. It goes back to that feeling that I’ve always had about sex objects in film. Most men think that they’d be able to handle that kind of life, but satisfying a sex addict isn’t always a sustainable life choice. So Chris starts drinking and his life falls apart and in turn, so does the existence of Justine, which is always in danger of being snuffed out by her own hand.

Using the unfinished movie and scenes from Franco’s Shining Sex and Midnight Party, D’Amato, all set to music from the Black Emanuelle films.

I don’t know if you understand how happy this makes me.

After inviting her childhood friend to make love one more time — as well as shave themselves to return to their innocent past — Justine recounts the sordid events that have led her here, at the end of quite literally her rope, a rope that also circles the neck of her lover, leaving himself behind for her to find, to fondle one last time and blow her brains out in a way that only Jess Franco (and D’Amato) could bring to us.

Franco shows up as a client that is deathly afraid of the power of Lina’s sexuality and you can completely understand how he feels. This is someone just in the periphary of her carnal car crash and unlike the manly men that surround her, he understands that no arms can ever truly hold her except those belonging to choir invisible.

At once a greatest hits package of Lina making love and a square up reel of the downside of all this excess, this movie is a mess, but it’s a glorious mess. It’s my mess and it’s freaking me out.

How many times can you make one movie? Well, if you’re Jess Franco, the answer is a bunch, because there’s 1975’s L’éventreur de Notre-Dame AKA Exorcism which was also remade as the adult Sexorcismes. There’s also another cut called Demoniac, because Franco realized that some day weirdos would obsess over his movies online.

Four years later, Franco Xeroxed his own work and added new footage to make this movie, which starts with Mathis (Franco) arriving in Paris and taking his blade to prostitutes and women who enjoy sex to save souls. He was thrown out of priest school because he’s insane and attacked a nun, so now he’s trying to get his story “The Return of the Grand Inquisitor” published in The Dagger and the Garter magazine.

While meeting with the owner of that sleaze zine, Pierre Franval, Mathis becomes obsessed with a secretary named Anne (Lina Romay) who is a lesbian in love with her roommate Rose, a fact that he learns by being a voyeur and that she also arranges sex-filled fake Black Masses by tying up and torturing a dancer named Nina, who is played by Franco’s real-life stepdaughter Caroline Riviere because, well, it’s a Jess Franco movie.

Of course, the psychodrama of the Black Mass isn’t real, but to Mathis it is, so he becomes the Inquisitor of his fiction, killing everyone and anyone involved. The tradeoff is that while we get some great shots of Franco with Notre Dame behind him, Lina’s role is significantly reduced.

I love that Stephen Thrower broke down on the blu ray how this all came to be. The movie comes at a period of life when Franco had been through great change. He’d divorced his first wife Nicole Guettard and, as these things happen, Romay had also divorced her husband Ramon Ardid. After making multiple movies in Switzerland for Erwin C. Dietrich and the death of friend and producer Robert de Nesle, Franco was back in Spain and burned out. Eurocine decided that they could take Exorcism and get production company Triton to pitch in some money to make Las Chicas de Copacapana and Two Spies In Flowered Panties, as well as this movie.

Somehow a slasher movie with not much blood and a sleazy movie without as much sex — yet still full frontal nudity — this is a weird case of a movie that has enough versions that you can just about make your own cut.

Gene Siskel said that it was “just a poor excuse for a lot of fighting.”

Writer Ernest Tidyman* (Shaft, High Plains Drifter) claimed he only made it so he could buy his mother a house.

Chuck Norris said it was ten times better than his last movie Good Guys Wear Black.

The commercial for this movie was all my grade school class could talk about, breathlessly getting excited about Chuck kicking and spinning and beating on people.

Directed by Paul Aaron, whose stepson Keanu Reeves talked him into making the film, this film presents a world where cops are getting killed, so they turn to Matt Logan (Norris), a karate instructor. One of those narcotics officers, Amanda Rust (Jennifer O’Neill, The Psychic star who was present both when Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally shot himself on the set of Cover Up and when she shot herself in the stomach testing to see if a gun was loaded), believes that one of their own is behind it. She also falls hard for Chuck, who may not be the best actor, but gives an authentic charm as a normal guy who can kick people really hard.

This is a smart movie — no, really — as the cast surrounding Chuck is solid, like Clu Gulager as detective Sam Dunne, who believes that the killer is a martial artist, and Ron O’Neal from Superfly.

A Force of One kicks into major action when Chuck’s adopted son Charlie (Eric Laneuville) is killed, making it personal. Plus, he’s headed into a karate tournament where he’ll get kicked repeatedly by Sparks, played by Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, who was the bodyguard who found the body of John Belushi. And trust me, he kicks really, really hard. You don’t get called Superfoot and half step.

Norris surrounded himself with family in this one, as brother Aaron was the fight coordinator and his son Mike was the skateboarding pizza delivery kid. It works — a movie made in the time when karate was the kind of dastardly heel move in Memphis wrestling, still mysterious in the West, but made approachable by the everyman charm of Chuck.

Called Der Bulldozer in Germany, this movie also has an appearance by Charles Cyphers, who played Sheriff Brackett just one year earlier in Halloween.

In closing, Siskel and Tidyman were both incorrect, while the kids in my class and Chuck were right.

*He co-wrote the movie with stuntman Pat E. Johnson, a 9th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do under Chuck Norris who only has this one writing credit, but did stunts for Jackie Chan (Battle Creek Brawl), Bruce Lee (Enter the Dragon), Norris (this movie), three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films and both Mortal Kombat movies. He’s also the referee in The Karate Kid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Look, if you’re going to rip off a poster…

Rip off the best, because one of the posters for this film — for Titanes del le Guerra, the name it played under in Spain — takes its inspiration from Blazing Combat #1, which was painted by Frank Frazetta.

Of course, Warren would rip themselves off by the end, endless reprinting their old stories and art, so that cover ran again on Creepy #89, an issue that reprinted several of the Blazing Combat stories. It’d get to the point where you had no idea how many original Warren stories you’d get in an issue or if you’d read them all before and you know, that sounds very much like Joe D’Amato.

Anyways, Tough to Kill is all about Martin (Luc Merenda, Puzzle, Pensione Paura), a hitman who joins Haggerty’s (Donald O’Brien, who ends up in nearly every Italian genre movie made from 1978 on, but he’s in a banana hammock in one scene in this) mercenary group to take on the suicide mission of blowing up a dam in enemy territory. But one of the men has a price on his head and Martin intends to collect, which means that he wants to make sure his team survives.

Along the way, the Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack recycles A Bay of Blood, one of the soldier’s pet bunnies gets laced with cyanide and fed to someone, someone says “you were at each other’s throats like wild geese” giving away what movie D’Amato is ripping off, O’Brien’s character testing his men by dropping a grenade between them and seeing what they’ll do when he isn’t making them salute the flag until they drop a log in their pants, an obstacle course that makes Takeshi’s Castle seem downright polite, a nod to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and somehow, D’Amato making a war movie without much gore and no nudity. Part of me is thinking that a lot was cut out of this movie, but I kind of know that he was coming down off the high that was Emanuelle and the Cannibals, which had to be like injecting heroin directly into his dick.