Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Thana (Zoë Tamerlis, who also wrote director Abe Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, is a mute seamstress working in New York City’s Garment District.

After she’s assaulted twice — once at gunpoint in an alley by a masked man and then again in her own apartment by a burglar — Thana lives up to her name, which is inspired by Thanatos the Greek god of death. She attacks the second man with a glass red apple and then beats him to death with an iron and leaves him in her tub. After dealing with her horrible work situation, she cuts her rapist apart and dumps him all over the city.

She keeps the man’s gun and soon uses it on another man who corners her, then runs up her steps and throws up in an echo of Paul Kersey’s first night of vigilantism in Death Wish.

Soon, she’s a literal Angel of Vengeance, which was the film’s other title. She targets a series of men who have treated women wrong and even causes one of them to kill himself when her gun jams. Finally, her vengeance reaches the point where she unleashes her full fury on her horrible boss and every man who attends her party as she whirls around, full action heroine, repeatedly shooting everyone while dressed as a nun.

Ms. 45 is better regarded than I Spit On Your Grave, perhaps because it doesn’t dwell in its rape scenes or have them take up much of the movie’s running time. Or maybe, just maybe, because it’s a much better movie.

Directed by Wil Aaron and written by Gwyn Thomas, this film was played in primary schools thanks to Bwrdd Ffilmiau Cymraeg, the Welsh Film Board, who produced it. While it seems odd and a bit scary to us as adults, imagine watching this if you were under ten years old and a captive grade school audience. One of the extras for this film, in the Severin All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2 set, has Aaron discussing how the movie was made and how he learned years later, through Facebook, how many Welsh children were absolutely destroyed by his movie.

In its native tongue, this is called O’r Ddaear Hen. A man named William Jones (Charles Williams) is toiling in his garden when he discovers a stone head. It’s so frightening to his wife that it causes her nightmares and she forces him to give the head to a female archaeologist at a local university. An expert on the Celts, she brings it back to her own home, where it starts to infect her family with fear, including a monstrous animal that keeps showing up. It all leads to a car wreck that seems beyond the budget of this feature.

O’r Ddaear Hen has led to childhood traumas, such as this quote I found from Mari Williams, who watched it when she was a student: “Whose opinion was that this was a film for children? It has created hours of lost sleep, years and trauma, and close to an accident a few times – you turn around to see if there is a man with horns in the back of the car, while driving – not to be advised.”

It’s films like this that are the reason why this box set exists. It’s just such a singular and strange film, one that created a stir in a country you may never get to and soon, you learn so much that you never expected to know.

From the Old Earth is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by musician Gruff Rhys, an interview with director Wil Aaron and featurettes on Welsh folklore and Welsh Film scholar Dr. Kate Woodward on the Welsh Film Board. There are also two shorts, Blood On the Stars, that has an introduction by Gruff Rhys and a cast reunion, and The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barra.

You can order this set from Severin.

The title of this movie means “prostitute with a hole in her” and comes from Indonesian myth. It refers to a dead sex worker who has either given birth inside her grave or had a child that was born through a hole in her back that is concealed by her long black hair. Wearing a long white gown, this vengeful spirit castrates men and takes children to replace the one that she has lost.

Directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra, this stars Suzzanna, the Queen of Indonesian Horror. She plays Alisa, who learns during her wedding reception that her new husband Hendarto (Barry Prima!) must go out to sea. As she waits alone, she decides to take a job as a model for a clothing store. To her horror, she learns that it’s really from her old boss — back when she was a call girl — Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) and Rudy (Rudy Salam), the scummy owner of the store who attempts to assault her.

As she runs from this, she’s forced off the road as a stationwagon is broken down in the middle of it. Four thugs and Rudy soon emerge to attack her, raping her multiple times. She gets no justice from the courts and a doctor refuses her when she tries to get an abortion, so when she tries to do it herself, she ends up dying, as her maid Bi Ijah (Marlia Hardi) finds her in a pool of blood, along with a fetus.

When her husband returns home, he puts flowers on her grave that mysteriously appear on her bed. He also meets her near-twin, Shinta, who is truly her and able to transform into a cat. Now comes revenge.

The revenge! Trees falling on men, a scumbag impaled by the tombstone of the woman he put on this path, even hands emerging from a wall to kill someone.

How classic is this movie and its lead? When it was remade in 2018, it — and the main character — were retitled Suzzanna: Bernapas dalam Kubur in tribute.

You will believe a ghost can eat all the food and drink all the soup in a restaurant before everything she has consumed drains from the hole in her back. You will hear “Night on Bald Mountain” many times. And your mind will be destroyed in all the best of ways.

Sadly, this is a film that perhaps speaks just as much to our world today as it did when it was made, across the world and forty years ago. A woman cannot get justice in any traditional way, much less rid herself of a child born through sexual assault. Only the supernatural and the other world can give her what she deserves.

Sundelbolong is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including Hantu Retribution, a featurette on the female ghosts of the Malay Archipelago and the short film White Song.

You can order this set from Severin.

September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.

What can you say about Fulci that hasn’t already been said? I wonder that as I begin writing this in the middle of a rainy night. This isn’t a post that’ll change anyone’s mind about his work and the relative artistic merits (or total lack of them). But it’s one of my favorite films and I’d like to opine on it for awhile. Please indulge me.

The film starts in flashback — 1927, Louisiana, the Seven Doors Hotel. A mob is convinced an artist is a warlock, so they crucify him, opening one of the Seven Doors of Death — allowing the dead into our world. Coincidentally, Liza — our heroine from New York City — inherits the hotel and her renovations reopen the door.

From there on out, Fulci says, “Cazzo la tua realtà” and embraces his worst impulses. The only way I can fully explain the craziness of this film is if I just list each insane moment in one long paragraph. Joe the plumber — not the political one — discovers a flooded cellar and gets his eye ripped out (if you’re playing a Fulci drinking game based on injuries to eyes and women, prepare to be the most inebriated you have ever been). A blind woman, Emily, and her dog, Dickie, inform Liza that she should stop. Joe’s wife and daughter try to claim his corpse, but the mother has her face slowly — “Sempre così lentamente!” I can hear Fulci yell from his director’s chair — burned off by acid and her daughter becomes one of the undead (zombies appear, drink three times) until she is shot by a bullet that sends her entire head spraying all over the screen in one of the most shocking scenes in pretty much all of film. Emily tells Liza to never enter room 36, but she does and discovers the ancient book Eibon and the still-crucified artist. Oh hey — Emily isn’t real — she’s trapped in the past and reaching out to us now, but her dog goes bad and tears her throat out. A dude falls off a ladder, gets paralyzed and the slowest death ever — a face eaten by spiders — occurs. Joe the plumber rises from a bathtub in a shot that rips off (pays homage to) 1955’s Diabolique and pushes a woman’s head through a nail, her eye being destroyed as a result (twice in one movie!).

Whew — so much happens that you may feel like you’re in a dream. That’s the way I see this film — a voyage from one terror to another, as one experiences nightmares that don’t seem to end. I see a lot of similarities to Jodorowsky in Fulci’s work. There’s no nuance — it’s all eyeballs popping, faces exploding, death upon death — but it’s there.

Fulci saw this film as having the closest to a happy ending that he would film. I’m not certain I agree — but it certainly is memorable. And if you haven’t seen it, why should I spoil it for you? I was ready for 2016’s The Void — a movie that could be a spiritual successor to this film — to end exactly the same way.  There’s also a reference in 2015’s Fulci loving We Are Still Here, as the handyman who unleashes the evil in the house is named Joe the Electrician.

This film was butchered — irony? — for years, with a heavily censored version playing in the U.S. as Seven Doors of Death. It wasn’t until the efforts of Grindhouse Releasing that the uncut version was finally shown in American movie houses. Fun fact — Grindhouse’s Bob Murawski is a film editor who used a shot from the spider bite sequence in the spider bite dream sequence of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man.

Even the original title of the film — …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà (…And You Will Live in Terror! The Beyond) — is great. I’ve written before about how evangelical I can get when discussing a movie that I really love. I promise that if you ever speak to me in person about The Beyond that my eyes will get crazy and I will grow very animated and make a big deal out of a film that Roger Ebert famously derided by saying, “The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough.”

It doesn’t matter — we cannot choose what we love. For pure atmosphere, dread and Fabio Frizzi’s incredible music, I end up watching this film quite often. Please try it for me. You can make fun of me afterward and I’ll still try to sell you on it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Directed by Frank Roach, written by Doug Ferrin, Celeste Hammond and Michael Sonye (the writer of Blood Diner, Cold Steel, Star Slammer) from a story by producer and star* Renee Harmon (Lady Street Fighter, Cinderella 2000, The Executioner Part II), Frozen Scream was originally shot for 28 days in Los Angeles before sitting until 1981, when Harmon did post-production shooting in Salt Lake City. Then it sat, unseen, until 1983, when it was released as a double feature with The Executioner Part II.

Harmon plays Dr. Lil Stanhope, who is working with Dr. Sven Johnsson (Lee James) to figure out the secret of immortality. They have a strange way of going about it, as they turn people into zombies and freeze them. When one of the scientists working with them, Dr. Tom Girard (Wolf Muser), refuses to work with them any longer, hooded men show up at his house and take him away, an act which makes his wife Ann (Lynne Yeaman) hysterical.

Lil informs her that men broke into her house, but they weren’t under hoods and no one injected her husband with drugs. Det. Sgt. Kevin McGuire (Thomas McGowan) wants to speak with her, but he keeps getting blocked by Lil. It turns out that in a moment of movie coincidence, she left him and married Tom the next day. There’s also the small matter of Ann watching a Halloween ceremony where people chanted “love and immortality” while fires were all over the beach. Is this next to Point Dume? As for where her husband was, he was confessing to Father O’Brien (Wayne Liebman), telling him that they were freezing rats and bringing them back to life. And when they returned, they had no souls.

The priest is soon killed and Ann is given a zombie caretaker nurse named Cathrin (Sunny Bartholomew). She starts getting phone calls from her dead husband, complaining that he is freezing, and more of the hooded men come to her and threaten to kill her. She escapes with Kevin and they make love. He confesses that he has never stopped caring for her. She says nothing.

Spoilers abound…but by the end, Lil has transformed Ann into a zombie and they come to Kevin’s hospital bedside. As she tells her lost lover that she has truly loved him all along, Lil injects him in the eye with the zombie formula. Is this next to Potters Bluff?

Roach went on to make Nomad Riders while would make Hell Riders and used footage from this movie in her movie Run Coyote Run, in which a psychic tries to find the murderers of her sister.

This was a Section 2 video nasty in the UK. This was not well-reviewed — many called out the narration over top of the dialogue — yet this is a movie where computer chips get put into peoples’ necks and they get frozen to become the living dead. Then, they get robes. And then a band turns Bill Haley and the Comets’ song “Rock Around the Clock into “Jack Around the Shack.”

There are movies that work way too hard to be strange.

This one was effortless.

*In Nightmare USA, she told Stephen Thrower, “I thought that if I wrote and directed and produced and starred, it would be too much, so I gave the credit away. Frank Roach was a cameraman but I decided it would be better to have another director on the film. I didn’t want to be credited as director, for business reasons. I directed the film.”

She also proclaimed, “It was filmed as I wrote it. No one could interfere with me.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

After mutilating and murdering a family, George Tatum has been jailed for years. Now, he has been given the opportunity to be reprogrammed and returned to society. That said — he still has nightmares of his childhood and a trip to a Times Square peep show unlocks flashbacks that make him a killer all over again.

En route to Florida — where his ex-wife, daughters and son live, George follows a woman home and kills her. Meanwhile, his doctors have no clue that he’s left the city.

Imagine his wife’s surprise when she starts getting all manner of threats over the phone. All she wants to do is carry on with her new boyfriend, Bob. She has enough to deal with, as her son C.J. is the worst of all horror movie kids. He often plays pranks that go way past the line of good taste, like covering himself in ketchup and pretending to be dead. So when the kid says that a man is following him, everyone thinks he’s just up to his normal young serial killer in training mischief.

After killing some of C.J.’s fellow students, George breaks into their house and kills the babysitter while mom is at a party. But C.J. calmly and cooly deals with it — he shoots his father with a revolver while dad has a flashback of catching his dad engaging in BDSM games with his mistress before he decided to kill them both with an axe.

The movie closes with C.J. sitting in a police car, mugging for the camera, while his mother returns to see her ex-husband’s body being removed from the house. How does C.J. know the camera is there? Has he learned how to break the fourth wall? Will he soon be able to hear his own theme song, much like Michael Myers? And when I’m asking questions, isn’t the full title, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, way better than just Nightmare?

Director Romano Scavolini started his career in porn, which might explain the incredibly casual nudity in the film and its devotion to giving the viewer exactly what they want from a slasher. It knows exactly why you’re here and gives you what you need. He stated about the film that he wanted to tell a story that has roots in reality and not just fantasy. A story of no hope, because mankind is at the mercy of its own demons. And, perhaps most importantly, a story where a young boy is unable to deal with the fact that his parents might just happen to be down with BDSM.

According to Matthew Edwards’ Twisted Visions: Interviews with Cult Horror Filmmakers, Scavolini claimed that prior to receiving distribution through 21st Century Film Corporation, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures had both wanted to buy the film, but only if the gore was cut down. Scavonli refused, feeling that “the strongest scenes had to remain uncut because the film should be a scandalous event.” Yeah, I’m gonna call bullshit.

This is a scummy, down and dirty affair. C.J. is an annoying kid, but who can blame him, He has the worst parents possible — one’s a serial killer and the other would rather party on down with Bob than deal with the wretched fruits of her ex-husband’s loins. Remember those 20/20 exposes on how horrible slasher movies were? This is one that lives up to those warnings.

You can get this on blu ray or 4K UHD from Severin.

Li “Little Flying Dagger” Xunhuan (Ti Lung) has wandered for three years but has finally come home, retiring from the martial world to have a normal life. Yet nothing can be that simple, as there are so many kung fu and weapons masters who want to kill him and be ranked as the best warrior in the martial world.

Directed by Yuen Chor, this was one of Shaw Brothers most popular movies. When you’re ranked number three in the world of all fighters, people are going to hunt you down, like Right Arm (Fu Sheng), who has inked the name of every man he has killed on his, well, right arm.

While the woman who caused Li to be sentimental — and an alcoholic — is alone and waiting for him, he’s really here to look up his old friend Ah Fei (Derek Tung-Sing Yee), who is content to go to sleep early and never fight, as well as be drugged by martial arts groupie — and now his wife — Lin Xanier (Linda Chu). However, she’s not very faithful and has been cheating on him with the leader of the evil gang known as the Monkey Clan.

Like a gunfighter exhausted in his old age, Li regrets his youth and the fight to be the best. It’s kept him from love, it’s ruined his friend’s life and now, he must keep on fighting people everywhere he goes. It’s no accident that this has Italian Western Morricone music behind so much of the swordplay. This is one of the rare times that the sequel is so much better than the first movie.

Based on Gu Long’s Before and After the Duel, the third installment in the Lu Xiaofeng series, this was directed by Chor Yuen. Just as the title states, this is about the sword fight between Ye Gucheng (Jason Pai) and Ximen Chuixue (Elliot Ngok), which will be to the death on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Once friends, no one knows why they are engaging in such a battle and when Ximen postpones the duel, Lu Xiaofeng (Tony Liu) and his fellow martial artists Sikong Zhaixing (Lung Ting-sang), Hermit Pine (Shum Lo), Hua Manlou (Sun Chien) and Monk Honest (Walter Tso) decide to learn the why.

That takes them to gambling dens, to rumors of revenge, to finding out that Ye may have been poisoned and that his wife, Leng Qingqiu (Ching Li), has grown ill. Strange still, only Ximen can heal Ye from his affliction, but will he?

Which technique is stronger? Wavering Sword or Floating Goddess? While the story that gets you there is long and wandering, at least Lu Xiaofeng is one cool hero. He’s nearly unstoppable with a sword and he has no issue telling those he fights exactly that. There are so many people with something to lose in this bet between two men, but when honor is in danger of being lost, that’s when both will have to put their life on the line.