Tag Archives: 1981

JUNESPLOITATION: Delusion (1981)

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DAY 24. Slashers!

Now, if you’re like me, you spent the better part of the 80s and 90s digging through the bottom shelves of mom-and-pop video stores, looking for big, chunky VHS big-boxes with insane cover art. Back in ’84, you might have rented this one from Embassy Pictures under the name Delusion, or maybe you grabbed the UK import from Sultan Video called The House Where Death Lives. Either way, you were in for a trip.

Our story kicks off with Meredith Stone (Squirm herself, Patricia Pearcy), a nurse who takes a gig at the massive, spooky Fairlawn estate. Her patient? Ivar Langrock, a wealthy, elderly gentleman played by none other than classic Hollywood royalty Joseph Cotten! Seriously, seeing the guy from Citizen Kane and Shadow of a Doubt navigating a sleazy, early-80s regional psycho-slasher is worth the price of admission alone.

Meredith is barely through the door before she notices a locked room on the second floor. Naturally, she snoops and finds Wilfred, Ivar’s mentally challenged son, who is kept hidden away. But that’s just the tip of the dysfunctional family iceberg. Soon, Gabriel (John Dukakis), Ivar’s grandson who has been living on a hippie commune in Arizona, shows up, and that’s when the bodies start dropping.

First, the family dog is found hanging from a tree. Then Wilfred takes a fatal dive out of a window. Next, Phillip the butler gets absolutely pulverized in the wine cellar under a fallen wine rack and a sturdy table leg. When the estate gardener and a detective get brutally bludgeoned to death, too, attorney Jeffrey Fraser (David Hayward) starts pointing fingers.

Is it the creepy commune grandson? Is it a disgruntled employee? Or is Meredith’s own dark past—involving an institutionalized mother and a predatory father—bleeding into reality?

Back in 1981, critics like Arthur Cabasos of the Abilene Reporter-News absolutely hated this flick, calling it “one of those boring horror movies” where the killer couldn’t even find a cool weapon, opting instead for “a sturdy coffee table leg to the temple.“

Man, critics just didn’t get it, did they?

Delusion isn’t trying to be Friday the 13th or The Burning. It’s not an effects-heavy gore-fest. It’s an old-school, gothic whodunit wrapped in a sleazy slasher coat of paint. I mean, the poster art emulates the classic Charles Allan Gilbert All Is Vanity optical illusion! Cinematographer Stephen Posey fills the screen with dread, and composer Don Peake supplies a score that keeps you perpetually uneasy. Sure, it’s low-key. Sure, it’s a bit slow-moving. But the atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife (or, well, a table leg).

Look, if you need a body count every five minutes and teenagers getting decapitated in sleeping bags, Delusion might test your patience. But if you have a soft spot for regional Americana horror, gothic melodrama, and a psychological twist ending that completely flips the script on everything you just watched, this is for you.

Patricia Pearcy gives a wonderfully unhinged performance, Joseph Cotten brings that effortless class, and Alice Nunn (Large Marge from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure!) even shows up as Duffy! What more do you want?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Heavy Metal (1981)

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I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later, and not a day goes by that this movie doesn’t cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares? There’s animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, “Soft Landing” starts the film. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man flying a car from space to Earth. He’s an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, “Grimaldi,” what he brings back kills him, and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy- and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius’ “The Long Tomorrow” has become “Harry Canyon,” the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In “Den,” based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone in the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and has become a superheroic character that everyone wants either in their bed or in the dirt. For me, this is the center of the movie, and, aside from the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that’s John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson’s “Captain Sternn” follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called “Neverwhere Land” was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and formed a loop set to either Pink Floyd’s “Time” or Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Magnificat: Passacaglia.”

The zombie segment with the haunted “B-17” is next, followed by an adaptation of Angus McKie’s “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on “Arzach” by Moebius, “Taarna” and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn as a young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns, and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie — which kept it from being legally released for years — is amazing. There’s everything from Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” and “Prefabricated” by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Veterans of Psychic Wars.” The band originally wrote the song “Vengeance (The Pact),” but the film’s makers thought it told the segment’s story too closely.  Both songs appeared on BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever ended up airing on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

JUNESPLOITATION: Kung Fu Zombie (1981)

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DAY 8: Zombies!

Pang (Billy Chong), a skilled martial artist, lands a local thug, Lu Dai, in jail after foiling a robbery. Upon his release, a vengeful Lu Dai hires a bumbling Taoist priest named Wu Lung to animate a small army of zombies to take down Pang.

Lu Dai is killed by his own trap, and his ghost haunts the priest, demanding to be resurrected. The priest attempts to put Lu Dai’s spirit into the corpse of a recently deceased serial killer, Kwan Wei Long. Because the killer is so evil, he returns as a powerful, free-willed vampire.

After Pang’s father — the man who trained him brutally all of his life to be a killing machine — dies, the priest tries to use his body to host Lu Dai’s spirit. The ritual is interrupted, resulting in the thug and the father sharing control of the body, forcing Pang to battle his own father’s reanimated corpse while also fighting the vampire.

You may dislike this for being incredibly cheap and for its erratic subtitle translations, such as calling corpses “salted fish.” Not me. I loved it.

Chong (born Chuang Chen Li) had an extensive career in both Hong Kong and Indonesia. Some of his other notable martial arts films include Jade Claw, A Hard Way to Die, Kung Fu Executioner, A Fistful of Talons and Kung Fu Beyond the Grave. Later in his career, he became a major household name in Indonesia, where he wrote, directed, and starred in several popular television series, including Deru Debu and Sapu Jagad.

Why do I love it? It has the balls to rip off Morricone’s Exorcist II: The Heretic score, has someone kick a man’s head clean off his body, and a vampire bad guy who not only comes out to the Bond theme but also has hands on fire. How did they do that effect? They set a man’s hands on fire, that’s how.

Oh yeah — director Shan Hua also made Portrait In Crystal, Bloody Parrot, Dynamo and Inframan. He knew what he was doing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Other Hell (1981)

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If you think you’ve seen it all because you sat through The Devils or owned a bootleg of Killer Nun, Bruno Mattei is here to grab your rosary beads and yank you straight into the abyss. The Other Hell (originally L’altro inferno) isn’t just a movie; it’s a 90-minute assault on every Sunday School lesson you ever endured.

Get ready for a movie overflowing with blasphemy, shot at the Convento di Santa Priscilla in Rome (once owned by FIAT but now by the Secret Service). Then again, the print that Severin used for the Blu-ray was found behind a false wall in a Bologna nunnery! I sum up this movie with these three words: Not fucking around.

Written by Claudio Fragasso (Rats: The Night of Terror) and directed by Bruno Mattei (Seven Magnificent Gladiators, Robowar), this is a pull-no-punches nunsploitation shockfest. You think mother! was bad?  Then you are by no means ready for this one. A baby gets boiled alive, and that’s the very least of the shocks in store. And if you’re Catholic, well, get ready to go to confession.

Boasting a Goblin score stolen from Beyond the Darkness (actually from their albums Roller and Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark; Fragasso said they had the band in the movie “as they were fashionable and asked them to write music for the film, but they asked for a lot of money, leading to the production to use stock music with a few modifications.” Mattei claimed that he was friends with their publisher, Carlo Bixio, who gave him the music he wanted.

The plot kicks off with Sister Cristina getting lost in the catacombs — never a good move in an Italian movie — where she finds Sister Assunta (Paola Montenero, Sylvie from A Bay of Blood) in a morgue laboratory. Assunta is busy embalming corpses and casually dropping lore about nuns fornicating with Satan and the mysterious murder of the previous Mother Superior, Sister Florence. Before you can say “Hail Mary,” Assunta goes into a supernatural trance, murders Cristina and then drops dead herself.

Mother Vincenza (Franca Stoppi, who was also in Beyond the Darkness) tries to play it off as an accident to Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli), but the gig is up when Sister Rosaria (Susanna Forgione) starts spraying blood from her mouth during communion and develops a case of terminal stigmata.

Enter Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo, who survived City of the Living Dead only to end up here). He’s a scientific priest sent to investigate, but he spends most of his time clashing with Vincenza, who runs the convent like a fascist boot camp.

It turns out the convent’s basement isn’t just for storing communion wine. It’s housing Elisa (Francesca Carmeno), Vincenza’s illegitimate, horribly disfigured daughter, who was tossed into boiling water at birth by the former Mother Superior. Elisa didn’t die, though; she just developed Carrie-esque telekinetic powers, like making people strangle themselves with their own rosaries.

By the time we get to the finale, Vincenza has dropped the act, admitted she made a pact with the Devil and claimed Elisa is the literal daughter of Satan. It all ends in the morgue with resurrected corpses, psychic battles, and Father Valerio losing his mind. The final kicker? The Bishop shows up to investigate the earthquake and gets a face full of rotting nun corpse falling out of a coffin.

Oh yeah — between priests being set on fire and a nun’s severed head in the sacristy, this movie is every nightmare you had in CCD class. When Mother Vincenza yells, “The genitals are the door to evil! The vagina, the uterus, the womb; the labyrinth that leads to hell; the devil’s tools!” you’ll either cheer or recoil in terror, depending on whether or not you ever sat through a five-hour Good Friday mass.

Seriously. This movie tested even my resolve of how far is too far. Which is just another way to tell you that I loved it.

This was shot at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza with most of the same cast and crew. Fragasso says that he shot The Other Hell downstairs and Mattei shot the other upstairs, helping each other as needed. As for Mattei, he would always say that Fragrasso was just an assistant director. They did the same two movies for the price of one on Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence In a Women’s Prison, as well as Scalps and White Apache.

Mattei was interviewed by European Trash Cinema and said, “Let’s say that he has influenced almost everyone. For example, L’altro Inferno/The Other Hell utilized Argento’s concepts, but wasn’t an absolute copy of Inferno, the title was dictated by the distributor. He makes movies wilh lots of blood, I’m not adverse to it but in some countries, like Germany, gory movies aren’t distributed.”

While it premiered in Italy in 1981, it didn’t reach American theaters until 1984, where it was renamed Guardian of Hell. It was unleashed on VHS by Vestron Video, finding its true home in the wood-paneled basements of horror nerds who wanted something a little more European.

I can’t believe that you could have walked into a multiplex and watched this.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The One-Armed Executioner (1981)

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Interpol agent Ramon Ortega (Franco Guerrero) and his new blonde American children’s book author wife Ann (Jody Kay, Death Screams) are back in the Philippines after a honeymoon in San Francisco. Within minutes, the drug dealer that our hero is after — Edwards (Christopher Mitchum) — has sent his men to kill Ann and has had his arm chopped off. And in case you’re wondering if the drug dealer is evil, he has an evil Axis symbol on the side of his boat.

Edwards doesn’t just want Ortega dead; he wants him broken. After the brutal hit on the beach that leaves Ann dead and Ortega’s arm severed by a machete, Edwards leaves him alive as a living warning. Ortega spirals into depression and drinking, just trying to live out the rest of his life in pain, when a new master named Wo Chen appears and teaches him how to fight with one hand and how to do gun fu, if you will, in which they have a gigantic training device with numbers. The master calls out the targets, and Ortega improves with each shot.

You feel for Ortega, as he found the right kind of woman, the one who sleeps with baby dolls and has sex in the shower with her shower cap on, the height of eroticism. But seriously, he really does hit rock bottom, but this film pulls him up and gives him the chance to get revenge.

Ortega eventually fits his stump with a specialized prosthetic that allows him to steady his aim, effectively turning his entire body into a tripod for his .45 caliber vengeance. The showdown moves from the slums of Manila to Edwards’ fortified compound. Ortega has to dismantle a small army of mercenaries using a combination of one-handed reloading techniques and raw, unadulterated 80s rage.

This movie is an absolute blast from start to finish, delivering the kind of weirdness and magical action that could only come from the Philippines and a master director like Bobby A. Suarez, who also directed American Commandos, The Bionic Boy, Cleopatra Wong and Warriors of the Apocalypse.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CULTPIX MONTH: Bumpy (1981)

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Look, we’ve all been there. You’re out in the woods, the sun is shining, you’re filling your pail with strawberries, and suddenly you realize you’ve wandered too far into the green abyss. For siblings Kusti and Iti, a simple foraging trip turns into a folk-horror nightmare when they stumble into the clutches of the Forest Mother, an evil hag with a penchant for child labor and a complete lack of hygiene.

Coming out of the Soviet-era Estonian studio Tallinnfilm, Bumpy (originally Nukitsamees) is based on the 1920 story by Oskar Luts. But don’t let the fairytale label fool you. This is one of those Eastern Bloc productions that feels like it was fueled by unpasteurized milk and ancient superstitions.

The hag forces the kids into a life of grimy servitude, but the real heart of the film is her son, Bumpy. He’s a shy, soot-covered little creature with literal horns growing out of his head. While his family is busy being quintessential forest-dwelling creeps, Bumpy forms a bond with Iti. It’s the kind of beauty and the beast friendship that can only happen when both parties are terrified of the same matriarch.

When the opportunity for a jailbreak arises, Kusti and Iti don’t just run for the hills. They take the little horned weirdo with them. The third act is essentially a fish-out-of-water story, but the water is a civilized village and the fish is a boy who thinks bath is a four-letter word.

Oh, it is? OK.

Bumpy’s horns and the general grime of the hag’s hut are peak 80s practical effects. There’s a tactile, earthy quality to the sets that makes you want to wash your hands after watching. All with a vibe that balances the thin line between a charming children’s adventure and the kind of movie that gave an entire generation of Estonian kids a permanent fear of the woods.

Director Helle Karis was a master of the musical-fantasy genre in Estonia. She didn’t just make movies; she built worlds that felt like they existed ten minutes behind a secret door in your backyard. It’s weird, it’s rhythmic, and it’s deeply rooted in the idea that family isn’t about whose horns you share, but who helps you escape the forest. If you’ve exhausted your supply of Grimm’s tales and need something with a bit more Estonian grit, this is your strawberry jam.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama 2026 Primer: Evilspeak (1981)

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April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.

Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.

Post-Carrie, we’ve seen so many films where people turn to the Devil to help them fit in or fight back against bullies. But let’s face it — when you dress up Carrie White or Sissy Spacek or Chloë Grace Moretz, they end up being attractive. But Clint Howard? There’s really no dressing up, Clint.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the man and his many, many contributions to film (Balok from the Star Trek TV series, Carnosaur, Apollo 13, Rock ‘n Roll High School, and so much more). But you can totally see how he fits his role as Stanley Coopersmith in this movie.

Evilspeak starts in the past, where Satanist Father Esteban (Richard Moll, who ends up in these reviews a lot, thanks to films like The Nightmare Never Ends and The Dungeonmaster) and his followers are exiled from Spain and denied the grace of God, unless they renounce Satan and his evil ways. We wouldn’t have a movie if they gave in, right?

Fast forward to the 80’s. Stanley Coopersmith is an orphan, a poor kid who has been allowed into a military school alongside the children of some of the nation’s richest and most powerful people. Everybody — including the teachers — pretty much uses Stanley like a punching bag. While cleaning the church cellar, he finds Father Esteban’s room, which is filled with black magic books and a diary. Stanley uses his 1981 computer skills to translate the book and learn more about Esteban. My words will not translate how great Stanley’s Apple II’s computing power is.

The next morning, Stanley’s classmates tie up his clothes and unplug his alarm clock, which leads him to be punished. As he cleans the stables, the school secretary finds Esteban’s diary. As she plays with the jewels on the cover, pigs attack Stanley. He returns to his room to find all of his belongings destroyed and his book gone.

Sick of running out of computer time, Stanley steals a computer and sets it up in the basement. He’s only missing a few ingredients — human blood and a consecrated host.

That evening, the cook takes pity on Stanley and gives him Fred, a puppy. Seriously, this is the only person in the entire film who treats our hero with an ounce of respect, unlike Coach Collins in Carrie, who tries throughout the film to treat her well.

Stanley gets the Eucharist he needs and notices Esteban’s portrait. As he begins the ritual, students in masks and robes attack him. Stanley’s woes are compounded when the caretaker accuses him of being a thief and attacks him. He yells for help, and the computer starts up, revealing a pentagram. Suddenly, the caretaker’s head is spun around, killing him. As he hides the body in the catacombs, Stanley finds decapitated skeletons and Father Esteban’s crypt.

The secretary tries to pry the jewels out of the black magic book, but bleeds all over it. As she takes a shower, demonic boars attack and eat her. This scene is gratuitous as fuck. It is also incredibly awesome because the movie is just about to stop torturing Stanley and go off the rails.

Stanley gets attacked by his soccer team, who tell him that if he tries to play in the big game, they’ll kill Fred the dog. After seeing him get beaten, the principal kicks him off the team. And it gets worse. As the team goes out drinking, they break into his hidden room and kill his dog.

At this point, I was screaming at the screen for Stanley to do something. It was as if he was listening. He steals another piece of communion and kills a teacher who follows him in by throwing him into a spiked wheel. The ritual begins, and Father Esteban takes control of Stanley’s body, taking up a sword and attacking the church service above.

What follows is a near orgy of destruction. A nail from the Crucifix goes right into the brain of a priest. Wild demon boars emerge while Stanley levitates above them and starts chopping off everyone’s heads in gory, bloody geysers. The lead bully runs, only to meet the zombie caretaker, who rips out his heart. Then, Stanley burns the church to the ground.

I’m not understating this — this is literally five or six minutes of pure Satanic revenge porn. Everyone who did anything to Stanley for the past running time of the film gets it good. It was enough to get this film classified as a “video nasty” in the UK, and there were even more gore scenes, but they have supposedly been lost forever after the MPAA cuts. The final UK release had none of the Black Mass text and none of the gore at the end — what a loss!

If the film ended here, it would be the best movie ever. But no, producer Sylvio Tabet was a devout Christian. That’s why he added a Khalil Gibran quote in the prologue and ended the film with a caption that states that only Stanley survived the attack, but went catatonic and is in Sunnydale Asylum. That said, Stanley’s face shows up on the computer in the basement and promises, “I will return.”

I discovered a great article that discusses just how Evilspeak was allowed to be shot in a Catholic church. Another urban legend of the film is that upon refurbishing part of the church, an aged priest saw the “new church” and dropped to his knees to thank God. I hope he never saw the film, one that Anton LaVey believed explained the Satanic faith (it appears on the approved films list of the Church of Satan’s website and Magus Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the COS, stated that the film is Satanic because it depicts “a fellow who is treated unjustly gets revenge on his cruel tormentors. But of course, there are some nifty jabs at Christian hypocrisy along the way…”).

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Lunch Wagon (1981)

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What was in the water in the late 70s and early 80s that we got so many movies about attractive women upsetting the balance of power in the food truck, gas station and restaurant industries? See: Swap Meet, Starhops, The Car Hops, Gas Pump Girls….

Directed by Ernest Pintoff (the director of Jaguar Lives!) and written by Marshall Harvey, Terrie Frankel and Leon Phillips, this has three ladies — Marcy (Pamela Jean Bryant, Don’t Answer the Phone), Shannon (Rosanne Katon, The Swinging Cheerleaders) and Diedre (Candy Moore) — working at Andy’s (George Memmoli) gas station. He’s a peeper, he’s a creep, and soon they inherit a food truck from Dick Van Patten, uncredited as Bernie Simmons, but he’s probably there to see his kids, Nels and James, who were in the cast. They rename it Love Bites, and hijinks ensue.

This has horrible stand-up and the Missing Persons (who are also U.S. Drag on the soundtrack, which has “Mental Hopscotch” and “I Like Boys”) showing up throughout. Rose Marie from Dick Van Dyke? She’s here, too. So is Louisa Moritz, who was Myra in Death Race 2000, Carmela in The Last American Virgin, Chi Chi in Hot Chili and Bubbles in Chained Heat. 

In honor of the film’s opening, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed September 11, 1981, to be Lunch Wagon Day, which included a parade of eighty lunch wagons. But it was more than just trucks; it was a full-scale Hollywood event. Starting at Hollywood and La Brea, the parade featured the Hollywood High School cheerleaders, stuntmen, the film’s star  and even Playboy Bunnies riding in a Mercedes 450 SL, handing out t-shirts. 

The gimmicks didn’t stop there. During the premiere, promoters reportedly gave out Smell-O-Vision cards to crowds waiting in line.

Also known as Come and Get It, this fits into a very specific window where independent producers realized that scrappy women vs. the system was a goldmine. It takes the male-dominated, grease-stained environment, adds a trio of charismatic leads and lets them outsmart everyone while upbeat synth-pop plays. I’m not sad for the time I spent watching.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CULT EPICS BLU RAY RELEASE: School In the Crosshairs (1981)

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Released months before lead Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s first groundbreaking teenage idol picture is a dazzling mix of special effects and blue-screen artifice, much like the film most know him for, House. Yuka (Yakushimaru) is a schoolgirl who discovers that she has psychic powers, just in time for the freethinkers of her school to come under attack by fascist mind-controlled Venusian kids led by the icy, telepathic Michiru. They enforce a New Order under the guise of academic excellence and discipline that may be the start of the planet going all bodysnatchers. 

It should come as no surprise, given who made this, that this movie goes all candy-coated, what with animation and art intruding into our reality whenever they want to. This was adapted from a novel by Taku Myamura, and it has no problems putting its emotions and politics right in the open. But this isn’t an art film; it’s a crowd-pleaser starring a woman who would become one of Japan’s biggest idols quite shortly.

The film is aggressive in its use of blue-screen composites that don’t strive for realism. Instead, they create a paper doll aesthetic where Hiroko Yakushimaru feels like she’s drifting through a living manga. Expect synthesized skies, hand-drawn lightning crackling over school hallways and dream sequences that bleed into the real world without warning. It’s a film where the background is just as likely to start moving as the actors.

Speaking of the house, in Koji’s home, check out the framed photograph of Yôko Minamida, the actress who played the aunt.

The Cult Epics Blu-ray of this film has a 2K transfer and restoration, and extras like audio commentary by film critic Max Robinson, a visual essay by Phillip Jeffries, an Obayashi poster gallery, trailers, a new slipcase art design by Sam Smith, a reversible sleeve with original Japanese poster art and a repro 24-page Japanese booklet. You can get it from MVD.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Kill Squad (1981)

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After a home invasion leaves Joseph Lawrence (Jeff Risk) paralyzed from the waist down and his wife sexually assaulted and dead, he reaches out to Larry (Jean Glaudé) to bring together their old army team, the Kill Squad: Tommy (Gary Fung), Arthur (Marc Sabin), K.C. (Jerry Johnson), Pete (Francisco Ramírez) and Alan (Bill Cambra). Once, they were prisoners of war, and Joseph earned their undying devotion by distracting the Vietcong by, well, standing on a landmine.

The man behind the attack is Dutch (Cameron Mitchell), but as the team tracks him down, a sniper keeps killing them as if this were a slasher movie and not a revengeomatic. Finally, Larry tracks down Dutch, who dies by accident, which is the very definition of anticlimactic.

It would be, except that — no spoilers needed for something you’ll figure out from the beginning of the film — Joseph explains that he resents the squad for the loss of his leg in Vietnam and faked his paralysis. In fact, he’s the one who paid for men to rape and kill his wife, all so he could get he rmoney and then kill the squad who left him behind.

Then Larry kicks Jeff right into an axe.

You really need to see the intros for each squad member. Tommy is working as a gardener and when that guy refuses to pay him and calls him a slur, he destroys the man in front of a pool party. K.C. is now a pimp with two girls, Salt and Pepper and no, not the rap trio. Pete is a mechanic. Alan is a bad businessman who is just about to lose everything as he does research on bugs, but mainly has sex with all the women in the office. Then, they do fancy weapon katas to show Joseph that they still got it.

Director and writer Patrick G. Donahue also made They Call Me Macho Woman!, Parole Violators, Ground Rules (a modern movie that nevertheless has a post-apocalyptic motorcycle game; this stars Frank Stallone and Richard Lynch and why haven’t I watched this?) and as G. Padon made the adult film Passion Prcession and the poster for that film is in this movie.

The best part? Or worse? The three Vietncong characters are in the credits as Vietnam Dude,” “Another Vietname Dude” and “Yet Another Vietnam Dude.” 

Also known as Patrick G. Donahue’s Kill Squad, because of course it should be.

You can watch this on YouTube.