After Superman, the Italian film industry did what it always does best: figure out how to make their own versions of a film. However, the danger of making superhero movies is that. the special effects — particularly after Star Wars and Superman, which was sold on the idea of believing that a man can fly — had to be perfect.

Alberto De Martino knew that Italian trend quite well. When sword and sandal movies were big, he directed The Triumph of Hercules. He made Ringo and Django clones in the spaghetti western craze. And when James Bond got hot, he made several Special Agent 077 movies. Giallo? De Martino turned out the New Mexico-shot The Man with the Icy Eyes, the Telly Savalas-starring The Killer Is On the Phone and the Dirty Harry meets Italian psychosexual horror in Canada romp Strange Shadows In an Empty Room. As The Exorcist and The Omen got hot, the director answered with The Antichrist and Holocaust 2000.

But superheroes? Superheroes nearly broke the man.

In Roberto Curti’s book Diabolika: Supercriminals, Superheroes and the Comic Book Universe in Italian Cinema, De Martino was quite candid about the failure of this movie. The Pumaman “was a production based on the trend of the moment. I had always done it that way and always done well. But regarding this genre of film, there was the audience’s diffidence toward Italian movies featuring special effects. They knew we were not up to the task, and didn’t take us seriously.”

He’d go on to say that it was “the only pic I did wrong in my whole career. When I saw it was a flop, I started asking myself questions. I had made a film I shouldn’t have. However it did well abroad and managed to get the guaranteed minimum back, otherwise I’d have had to sell my house. It did not even gross half a billion lire in Italy.”

Pumaman was played by Walter George Alton, his only film role before he became a medical malpractice attorney in New York City. He’s the ancestor of ancient aliens that gave birth to the Aztecs and entrusted a guardian armed with a golden mask. Ah — superheroes, Erich Von Daniken and Italian cinema? Bellisimo!

The mask is discovered by archaeologist — and the daughter of a Dutch ambassador — named Jane Dobson (Sydne Rome, who grew up near Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio before heading out to Italy to make movies like Man Called Amen and Sergio Martino’s Sex With a Smile). She learns that it can control minds, which pleases her boss Dr. Kobras (Donald Pleasence!) who takes over her brains instantly and then decides to start a Herrod-like campaign to kill Pumaman before the reincarnated hero becomes a threat.

Pumaman ends up being American paleontologist Tony Farms, who learns of his powers after the Native American named Vadinho throws him out a window and he survives the experience. How many people did Vandinho toss before he met the real Pumaman?

Of course, Tony and Jane are destined to fall in love and make the Pumababy, as foretold when the aliens visit Stonehenge and take the golden mask back. Of course.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi with riffing from Mystery Science Theater 3000. You’re going to need it, because the man who never said no to a role, Donald Pleasence, stated that this was the worst movie he did in his entire career. Just imagine the depths of that statement.

Back when he was a child, The Being — the bad guy in this movie who has that name because there’s no way the creators of this film didn’t see Halloween and say, we need The Shape — was made fun of for his white eyeball-less eye and then fell out of a tree. That’s the kind of traumatic — trhaumatic? — adolescent experience that makes you strangle dogs and make love to corpses. Such is life in Italian slasher scum movies.

Yes, it’s another in the long series of films where my wife wanders in just as a nude woman is being photographed in a park, only to be mercilessly dispatched by a killer. She looks at me in disgust and says, “Your movies…”

Director Gianni Martucci was also behind 1988’s The Red Monks. Here he’s basically making an American slasher, complete with characters you learn nothing about other than the fact that you can’t wait to watch them die.

That said, the killer plays with Duplo blocks when he isn’t popping the heads off of obviously stuffed cats. And the film is quite literally packed with disco music. I think that more slashers could use some disco, but that may just be the result of me loving Prom Night so much.

This isn’t available in the U.S., so let me save you some time and attach the YouTube link below. It’s not exactly great, but it’s certainly not boring.

Giorgio Cavedon created Italy’s first openly erotic fumetti — photo comic — Isabella. This tale of 1600’s France was adapted into the film Isabella Duchess of the Devils by Bruno Corbucci, which was released in the U.S. as Ms. Stiletto.

Working under the titles Self-Portrait and Portrait of a Ghost, this film finally settled on the title Ombre, which means Shadows. I’ve seen Mario Caiano credited as the co-director on this film. He also was behind the films Nightmare Castle, Shanghai Joe and Eye in the Labyrinth.

Renato is depressed and has a past filled with trauma. But perhaps things are looking up thanks to Monica, a college girl that he’s met. Unfortunately for him — and perhaps the opposite for us as we’d not have a movie to watch otherwise — she lives in a dismal home haunted by the spirit of her evil grandmother.

Ombre was a failure in theaters and has only been released n VHS in Italy. Somehow, thanks to the miracle of the internet, I’ve had the chance to watch it. Several members of the Gialloholics Facebook group got together to restore this, a movie that has no major re-release, which is amazing in the digital world that we live in today.

That said — it’s a slow-moving film that is more psychological than what I was hoping for. There is disco dancing, which I always appreciate in movies, however. Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

Rebecca Balding seems like someone who could have been a scream queen, between appearances in this movie, the made for TV movie Deadly Game and The Boogens.

That said — this movie ended up changing between it being shot and shown in theaters.

Diane McBain (Wicked Wicked) was originally cast as a police detective but the first take on the movie was considered unwatchable. So the script was rewritten by Jim and Ken Wheat (The Return, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, After Midnight and Pitch Black) and then reshot with genre stars Yvonne De Carlo, Barbara Steele and Cameron Mitchell.

All in all, only 15% of the original footage remained in the film.

Balding plays Scotty Parker, a college student in need of a last minute place to stay. That place ends up being the cliffside home of Mrs. Engels (DeCarlo), who lives in the house along with several college students and her son Mason.

In just a few days, one of them is dead thanks to a knife and the cops — played by Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schriber, who you may remember as the Russian Olympics coach Markov in The Concorde … Airport ’79 — are looking into the Engels.

The big reveal of this is that Victoria (one of the last roles Steele did before taking an extended break from theatrical films; she did, however, act in and produce the hugely successful The Winds of War mini-series with Dan Curtis) attempted suicide when she got pregnant with Mason and has been both silent and filled with murderous rage ever since.

That 15% or less of original footage is mainly what Mason is watching on television. Crazy, right? Even stranger — Murray Langsdon, the Unknown Comic, was the original actor to play the role and treated him as an over the top homosexual villain.

The Engels house is actually The Smith Estate, which is located in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. You may recognize it as the Merrye house from Spider Baby.

You can get this from Ronin Flix.

William Lustig took the profits from 1977’s Hot Honey to make this guerilla shot piece of sleazy, slimy slasher brilliance. The other money came from half of star Joe Spinell’s salary from Nighthawks and British producer Judd Hamilton came up with the rest of the money (around $200,000) with one condition: his then-wife Caroline Munro would be the heroine.

Originally, her role was to be played by Daria Nicolodi, but she was unable to go to New York for filming because she was still filming her scenes for Inferno in Italy. Supposedly, Susan Tyrrell and Jason Miller were both going to be in the movie too.

Just to give you an idea of how outlaw this movie was, for the scene where Frank Zito — the film’s titular maniac — kills Tom Savini in a scene inspired by the Son of Sam, Savini had a cast waiting filled with blood and leftover food. He blasted it with a live shotgun, threw it in the trunk of assistant Luke Walter’s car and they all drove off. No permits. No asking for permission. No prisoners.

PS — That body that gets its head blown off? Its name was Boris and it also shows up in Dawn of the Dead. After this movie, According to Savini, it was locked in the trunk of the car used in the shotgun scene and both were sunk in the East River.

Maniac is nothing without Spinell, whose rantings and maniacal look lend this movie its soul, as gross and covered with muck as it may be. He was abused by his prostitute mother and has turned his rage into a need to destroy women. He does so in all manner of ways, always ending up by scalping them and placing their hair on the mannequins he keeps in his squalid apartment.

This movie is everything horrible that everyone ever told you that horror movies were. It has no redeeming qualities or pretentions to art. It’s as rough as it gets, like Pieces if that movie wasn’t so funny.

Believe it or not — this is a positive review.

I’ve always held off from watching this movie but I’m glad I did. Spinell was nothing short of brilliant in everything I’ve ever seen him in and this one just keeps that trend going. I love him in Cruising, Nighthawks and the Rocky films.

The only strange thing to me is how Anna (Caroline Munro!) is willing to be in the same orbit as Zito. It’s a small point. After all, they did three movies together (Starcrash and The Last Horror Film are the other two).

Abigail Clayton, who plays a victim named Rita, was an adult actress who successfully moved into mainstream roles. Sharon Mitchell also shows up as a nurse, as does Carol Henry (Bloodsucking Freaks), Hyla Marrow (also in Lustig’s Vigilante), Rita Montone (who was in Bloodsucking Freaks and The Children) and Kelly Piper (Rawhead Rex and Vice Squad),.

Maniac was a green movie, as it recycled two big things from past films: you can spot the headless corpse of Betsy Palmer from Friday the 13th in Zito’s hovel and the helicopter shots were taken from Argento’s Inferno.

This was remade in 2012, but I still haven’t seen that yet. I kind of don’t want to ruin the power of this movie, a film so strange that it’s not even sure of the fate of its main character even as the film draws to a close.

You can watch this on Vudu and Shudder. Also, Blue Underground — Lustig’s company — has an incredible 3-disc version of this that is the last word on the film, at least until we can beam movies directly into brains.

Pittsburgh is more than just my hometown. If you believe a source as vaunted as Joe Bob Briggs, we’re also the birthplace of modern horror, thanks to George Romero and friends creating Night of the Living Dead right here (well, actually Evans City, 45 minutes north of the city).

Horror may have laid dormant for a decade or so, but the 70’s and 80’s were packed with genre defining creations made right here in the City of Bridges. There’s Dawn of the Dead, Martin and Day of the Dead just to name a few.

Then there’s the 1980 fim Effects, made by several of Romero’s friends and all about the actual process of making a scary movie and the philosophy of horror. Much like every fright flick that emerged from the Steel City — let’s not include 1988’s Flesh Eater, a movie I’m not sure anyone but S. William Hinzman has any pride in — it goes beyond simple shocks to delve into the complex nature of reality, man’s place in the world and what it means to be afraid.

Pittsburgh is also a complex city, one that started last century as “Hell with the lid off,” died in the late 1970’s and rose, much like the living dead, to become a hub for tech many years later. Effects is a document of what it once was decades ago and holds powerful memories for those that grew up here.

Joe Pilato (Captain Rhodes from Day of the Dead) stars as Dominic, a cinematographer who has travelled out of the city to the mountains — around here, anything east of the city is referred to as “going to the mountains” — to be the cameraman and special effects creator for a low-budget horror movie.

In case you are from here, he’s going to Ligionier. For the rest of the world, imagine a rural wooded area, the area where Rolling Rock beer once came from — yes, I know it’s Latrobe yinzers — Anheuser-Busch bought it, moved the plant to Newark, New Jersey and stopped making it in glass lined tanks. As a result, it now tastes like every mass produced beer out there. It’s also a place with a Story Book Forest theme park.

I tell you that to tell you this — imagine a team of horror maniacs descending on this quiet little town to make a movie about coked up psychopaths making a snuff film in the woods.

Director Lacey Bickle (John Harrison, who created the music for many of Romero’s films and directed Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) is a strange duck, one who wants to push his crew to film scenes days and nights.

Luckily, Dominick meets Celeste, a gaffer who is disliked by the rest of the crew. They quickly fall in love at the same time as our protagonist discovers that an entirely different film is being made, one whose special effects don’t need any technical wizardry. As secret cameras begin to roll, what is real and what is Hollywood by way of Allegheny County wizardy?

Dusty Nelson, Pasquale Buba, and John Harrison — the three main filmmakers — all met at public TV station WQED, the home of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and all worked together on the aforementioned Martin. Inspired by their work on that film, they started an LLC and raised $55,000 from friends and family to make this movie.

Due to a distributor problem, Effects was never released in theaters or on home video. It’s lone theatrical screenings were at the U.S. Film Fest — which is now the Sundance Film Festival — and it had its world premiere at the Kings Court theater in Oakland, right down the street from Pitt, on November 9, 1979.

According to the website Temple of Schlock, Effects was picked up by Stuart S. Shapiro, a distributor who specialized in offbeat music, horror and cult films like Shame of the Jungle and The Psychotronic Man. His International Harmony company distributed the film, but it played few, if any, theaters. Shapiro would go on to create Night Flight for the USA Network.  In October 2005, Synapse would finally release this film on DVD for the first time ever.

Pittsburgh is a lot different now. The Kings Court, once a police station turned movie theater transformed into the Beehive, a combination coffee shop movie theater, is now a T-Mobile store, a sad reminder that at one time, we rejected the homogenization of America here in Pittsburgh. Nowehere is this feeling more telling than at the end of this film, where the movie within a movie has its premiere on Liberty Avenue. Now in the midst of Theater Square, this mini-42nd Street went the very same way, with establishments like the Roman V giving way to magic and comedy clubs. As a kid, when my parents drove down this street, I was at once fascinated and frightened by dahntahn. But no longer.

You can also get the AGFA blu ray release of this from Amazon. It’s made from a rare 35mm print that was made before the distributor backed out. You can also watch this on Shudder.

Kevin Connor directed the Amicus-produced From Beyond the Grave, as well as several fantasy films for that studio and others in the 1970’s that included The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core, The People That Time Forgot, Warlords of Atlantis and Arabian Adventure. It was almost made by Tobe Hooper, which seems like the kind of urban legend that follows so many late 70’s and early 80’s horror movies.

That brings us to Motel Hell, which arrived as the slasher boom was about two and a half years in. While this was intended as a serious film at one point, it certainly ended up anything but.

It was shot at the Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, California, the same location where The Devil’s Rejects, The Lords of Salem, Hatchet and many more films were lensed.

Farmer Vincent Smith (cowboy actor Rory Calhoun) and his sister Ida (Nancy Parsons, Beulah Ballbricker from the Porky’s series) own a farm with the Motel Hello on the grounds. Their smoked meats are famous everywhere, because as the tagline says, “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.”

That’s because — no spoiler really — they’re human flesh. The farmer sets traps, catches drivers on the roads nearby, cuts their throats and then buries their bodies in his secret garden until they’re ready for harvest.

One of those victims is a motorcyclist named Bo, who is buried deep while his girlfriend Terry (Nina Axelrod, Roller Boogie) is taken to the motel. After being told her man is dead, she settles in and is unsuccessfully wooed by Sheriff Bruce (Paule Link, TV’s CHiPs and Grand Theft Auto). Much to Bruce’s chagrin, she seems attracted to his brother, Farmer Vincent.

Meanwhile, our protagonist — I guess Farmer Vincent is the kinda sorta lead of this — is luring in more victims via wooden cows that cause accidents and ads in swingers magazines. Soon, he decides to teach Terry how to smoke meat, which causes Ida to go bonkers and attempt to drown the young girl. Vincent saves her, she falls head over heels and instead of having sex — as she hoped — he asks her to marry him. She agrees.

Bruce tries to protest, saying that his brother is simple and has syphilis of the brain, but Vincent chases him off with a shotgun. That causes him to start to investigate all of the disappearances.

After a champagne toast, Terry passes out due to her spiked drink and our brother and sister tea, start prepping the wedding feast. As they head to the slaughterhouse, Bo gets loose and frees the other people planted in the garden. And as Vincent tells Terry his secret recipe, she freaks out.

What follows is slasher movie history, as Farmer Vincent dons a pig’s head and duels his brother with chainsaws before dying, gasping out that he was a hypocrite for using preservatives. As the survivors leave the farm, the sign finally malfunctions, leaving behind the words Motel Hell.

There are plenty of great secondary players in this, from radio DJ turned entertainment personality Wolfman Jack as a TV evangelist named Reverend Billy to Elaine Joyce (Ragman’s mother in the slasher par excellence Trick or Treat), Monique St. Pierre (November 1978 Playboy Playmate of the Month and 1979 Playmate of the Year who is also Cerce in post-nuke treat Stryker), Rosanne Katon (September 1978 Playmate of the Month, also in Bachelor Party and the Swinging Cheerleaders before leaving acting behind to do stand-up comedy, raise her autistic son to be an expert cellist and working with her husband to do good around the world with Operation USA, which supplies relief to areas impacted by natural disasters and poverty) and a rock band that has John Ratzenberger (yes, from Cheers but also from House II) in it.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory or watch it for free on Tubi, Vudu and Amazon Prime.

For some reason, old Hollywood actors often show up in slashers. Jackie Coogan, whose career stretched from silent films to playing Uncle Fester on The Addams Family to, well, The Prey appears in this, his last film. Coogan also was the reason for the California Child Actors Bill, the first known legal protection for the earnings of child performers, which is better known as the Coogan Act.

The Prey didn’t play theaters until nearly four years after it was made. It was created by the husband and wife team of Edwin and Summer Brown, who had previously worked on the video nasty Human Experiments. This was their first non-adult movie.

Back in the late 1940’s, a fire raged through the Rocky Mountains and wiped out a family of gypsies that all lived in a cave. Of course, one of them survived.

It all starts with two old people getting killed as they cook around a campfire. Then, the film alternates between an increasingly intense pace and long stretches of nature footage that was supposed to prove the difference between killer and his prey, but also padded the film so it had a decent run time.

Let’s meet our teen couples. There’s Nancy and Joel, played by Debbie Thureson and Steve Bond, who we all know better as Travis Abilene from Picasso Trigger. Here’s Bobbie and Skip, played by Lori Lethin from Bloody Birthday and Robert Waid from Summer Camp. Finally, we have Greg and Gail, who are played by Philip Wenckus in his lone acting role and Gayle Gannes from Human Experiments.

They’re helped on their camping trip by hunky ranger Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostick, Shazam! himself!) and crusty older ranger Lester Tole (Coogan). Gail’s convinced before too long that someone is watching them and before you can say Jason Vorhees, she’s dead and so is Greg.

That burned up gypsy boy goes after everyone with a real vengeance, including a scene where he leaves Gail and Greg’s bodies for the vultures, a moment that’s poignantly intercut with the group’s first meeting.

I love the ending of this film, where it feels like Ranger Mark has taken out the clawed and disfigured killing machine, only to have his neck snapped as if it were nothing. Then, the killer slowly approaches Nancy and caresses her hair.

After some nature footage — get ready for so much nature footage — we move several months into the future, where we see the cave where the killer’s family died in the fire and hear the cries of a baby. Now that’s dark.

The monster in this is played by Carel Struycken who would go on to play not just Lurch in the modern Addams Family movies, but also the Giant in Twin Peaks.

You can grab the Arrow Video re-issue of this film from Diabolik DVD. It’s packed with all manner of extras, from cast Q and A’s to a tour of the shooting locations. It even has two cuts of the film: the U.S. theatrical cut and the so-called gypsy cut with the extended beginning. You can run a composite cut of the film so you get the ultimate version of the film. Plus, there’s an audience reaction track from this year’s Texas Frightmare so that you can pretend you’re sitting with a rabid crowd!

Seeing as how this was shot around the same time as Friday the 13th, it may have been seen as imitator when originally released, but it totally stands on its own. After all, what movie has a better tagline? “It’s not human and it’s got an axe!”