I know it’s not exact, but I was struck by a moment in this film that recalls Messiah of Evil as a character stans in a hallway and we’re struck by just how alone she is in spite of being in a very public place.

Mansion of the Living Dead

Messiah of Evil

It’s not a perfect match, but the feeling is right and I’m struck that at times, Jess Franco can render a great horror mood. Other times, he’s moving the camera so wildly that you wonder if he’s going to ever focus on something happening.

Several waitresses — including Candy Coster, who we all know is Lina Romay in a blonde short wig and love her even more for it — visit an out of season resort hotel, only to find that long-dead monks have come back from the dead, watched a few Amando de Ossorio movies and start luring the women one at a time to the basement where they’re assaulted and then murdered to the sound of bells, the wind and an otherworldly song. So yes, pretty much the Blind Dead with dried shaving cream for makeup.

Also, for some reason, Eva León from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is chained to a wall by Antonio Mayans and taunted with promises of food.

Somehow, someway, Candy is the reincarnation of the witch who cursed the monks all those years ago and perhaps she’s also the one that can free them, except she’s kind of busy making out with Lea (Mari Carmen Nieto, The Sexual Story of O) and hiding that fact from their friends Mabel (Mabel Escaño, Wicked Memoirs of Eugenie) and Caty (Elisa Vela, Cries of Pleasure), thinking that they’d be judged, but then those two are also getting down.

Look, Lina gets possessed, goes wild and ends up making out with an evil monk, which releases everyone from their curse and…yeah. Look, this movie is pretty much exactly what I seek out and often I’m using movies as drugs to erase my consciousness, so go in with that knowledge.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally ran on December 13, 2020, back in the days when the idea of watching more than fifty Jess Franco movies in one month felt either quixotic or just plain insane. Well, as we’re currently in the middle of a month of Franco’s films, let’s bring this back with some more info and thoughts.

Jess Franco wrote, directed, produced, acted and scored around 200 or so feature films and I have been cursed to watch all of them. This one, he made for French producer Marius Lesoeur and its also known as L’Abîme des Morts-Vivants* (The Abyss of the Living Dead), as there are unqiue Spanish and French versions of this movie.

This is where I discovered the drug inside a Franco film and his ability to somehow lull you into a fuzzed out haze, helped by a bad looking print, as you wait and wait and watch and hope and dream of the moment when the zombies that guard some Nazi gold will emerge and kill the treasure hunters.

Tubi has a print that looks like a VHS that has been rented thousands of times, which makes this so much better of a viewing experience than a pristine version would be.

Roger Braden also reviewed this for our site and he said, “Looks and sounds like a decent movie to watch, right? You couldn’t be more fucking wrong.” and “When the zombies finally make their appearance they are some of the worst looking creatures you’ll ever see.”

Yeah, Jess Franco is an acquired taste.

Robert Blabert, the hero trying to find the Nazi gold, should be like forty if this is really set in 1982. And the Nazis hunting him shouldn’t probably be much, much older. But come on, why am I looking for logic in a zombie movie, much less something to make sense in a Jess Franco movie?

*It’s also known as Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, El Desierto de los Zombies, The Grave of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Living Dead and for having a Spanish version called La Tumba de los Muertos Vivientes that is blessed with Lina Romay as the Nazi doctor’s wife.

You can watch this on KInoCult.

Oasis of the Zombies is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

Deadly Games may have been sold as a slasher, but it’s more of a murder mystery. Sure, the killings are pretty intense — a long drowning, burying a victim alive — but it’s maybe even less a murder mystery and more a late 70s, early 80s small town romantic drama where lots of people swing and one of them — either a cop or Vietname vet — is a masked killer.

It’s interesting how little this movie cares about fitting into any neat and clean box.

Clarissa Jane Louise “Keegan” Lawrence (Jo Anne Harris) is a rock journalist back home after the death of her sister, a murder that she’s out to solve. After all, her sister didn’t jump out of a window like that, right? She had to have been thrown.

Dick Butkis, the Chicago Bears linebacker legend that had such a long career after that as a kid I just thought he was an actor, owns a coffee shop in town. That’s where a lot of the exposition happens, like how strange Billy Owens (Steve Railsback) is, a Vietnam soldier not back home all in one mental piece who is obsessed with monster movies and his horror-themed game of Chutes and Ladders and oh yeah, he also lives in an old movie theater and sounds like someone I’d go out of my way to be friends with. That said, it’s set up that he has to be the masked killer. Certainly the killer can’t be Sheriff Roger Lane (Sam Groom), because he’s nice and plays on the swings and romances Keegan.

Director and writer Scott Mansfield seems out to make a movie that makes you believe it’s a slasher and then pulls the rug out from under you with an ending that completely predates Scream — without spoilers, but man, that does feel like a spoiler.

The board hame in this is Universal monsters inspired and I love that Roger and Billy have been playing it for decades, as well as the killer somehow knowing way too much about it. I can only wish I still had friends ready to play a board game that often.

Coleen Camp and June Lockhart are in this as well, so my casting brain was quite impressed by who Mansfield got to be in this movie.

It’s not perfect, it’s probably too long and too talky, but I enjoyed the laid back vibe of Deadly Games. The last ten minutes are worth the time that it takes to get there and I was pretty surprised by the leap that the film makes.

Arrow Video’s new blu ray release of the film has a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, new audio commentary with The Hysteria Continues, interviews with actor Jere Rae-Mansfield and special effects and stunt co-ordinator John Eggett, an image gallery with never-before-seen production photos and promotional material, the trailer, the original screenplay under the title Who Fell Asleep, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Ralf Krause, and a fully-illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film historian/author Amanda Reyes. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We wrote about this movie all the way back on September 27, 2018 so we added some new info to this article as we celebrate a week of Joe D’Amato.

A film with many AKAs — Anno 2020: I Gladiatori del Futuro (Year 2020 Gladiators of the Future), Futoro, 2020: The Rangers of Texas, 2020: Freedom Fighters and Sudden Death — the film we’re going to call 2020 Texas Gladiators starts with a long battle after the end of the world, bringing you in before there’s even any story. Who even cares if there’s a story? People are getting killed left and right!

We have 5 heroes here — who would assume are the Texas Gladiators– and they are Nisus (Al Cliver, Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072), Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen, War Bus which is a totally different movie than War Bus Commando), Jab (Harrison Mueller, She), Red Wolfe (Hal Yamanouchi, Rat Eater King from 2019: After the Fall of New York) and Halakron (Peter Hooten, the original Dr. Strange!).

They have to save this monastery, but they just sit and watch as more people get attacked, a priest gets crucified and a nun gets so upset over everything that she grabs a piece of glass to slice her own throat What are they waiting for? Are they just going to watch everyone die?

Then, to make them look even more inept, Catch Dog tries to rape one of the survivors! You guys are the heroes? Well, at least they kick him out after that. And that unfortunate woman is Maida (Sabrina Siani, Oncron from Conquest!), who hooks up with Nisus. Years later, they’re all settled down, the rest of the guys have gone their own way and Catch Dog has started an evil gang. Just like your friends from college. Except that Catch Dog hasn’t forgotten anything.

Of course, Catch Dog’s gang attacks the town where Nisus lives with his family. Surprisingly, they fight back the invaders, but then a vaguely Nazi army attacks and defeats our hero, shooting him across the forehead. Then the army kills and rapes everyone and everything, taking the town apart.

The leader of this army, Black One (Donald O’Brien, Dr. Butcher M.D. himself!) tells everyone that he’s in charge. They then take Nisus and force him to watch his wife get raped. This movie has more violent sex than — oh, Joe D’Amato and George Eastman directed it? Yeah. It figures.

In one of my go-to reference guides to Italian exploitation, Spaghetti Nightmares. D’Amato says that Eastman “didn’t feel confident enough in the action scenes and so I dealt with those, leaving him to the direction of the actors. But in this case, the name recorded at the Ministry (director’s credit) was mine.”

Later in that book, Eastman pretty much makes anyone who likes these movies feel bad about their chocies: “These (post-atomic) films, which were made in the wake of the various Mad Max movies, were decidedly crummy. The set designs were poor….and the genre met a swift and well-deserved death. I only wrote these awful movies for financial reasons….no attempt at originality was made at all.”

So what happens with our hero? He attacks one of the guys and gets shot a hundred times and dies. Is that the end of the movie? Nope. Instead, our old friends Halakron and Jab find Maida, who has been sold to a gambler, and Halakron wins her in a game of Russian Roulette. They all get busted for a bar fight, where they get tortured in salt mines. Luckily, Red Wolfe comes to save them.

Catch Dog’s gang attacks, but our heroes fake their deaths. They also meet up with a gang of Native Americans. Jab has to defeat one of them in battle to get them to join with our heroes. Of course, he wins. He’s Jab, bro.

Maida gets to kill Catch Dog, but Jab doesn’t make it. He dies in his friend’s arms because this is an Italian movie and even the heroes can die. Luckily, Halakron gets to kill Black One with a hatchet. So there’s that.

Halkron, Red Wolfe and the Native Americans win the day, save everyone and then ride off into the sunset, because post-apocalyptic Italian movies are just spaghetti westerns with shoulder pads. Italy is Texas. Texas is Italy.

There are better post-apocalyptic films than this. But there are worse ones, too. It’s a hard one to get, but luckily Revok can help you.

After the media excitement around the controversy of Tinto Brass’ Caligula, there came — pun intended, always — plenty of ripoffs as is the Italian exploitation cinema way of life. They include the Bruno Mattei films Caligula And Messalina and Nerone e Poppea, Caligula Reincarnated As Hitler (AKA Cesare Canevari’s The Gestapo’s Last Orgy so it’s a really Naziploitation and not Caligulaspoitation or even Roman Porno, which comes from Japan, not Italy), Bruno Corbucci’s Messalina, Messalina! (AKA Caligula II: Messalina, Messalina and shot on the very same sets and using the same costumes as Brass’ film with no permission), Lorenzo Onorati’s Caligula’s Slaves (a ripoff of the movie we’ve about to discuss), Jaime J. Puig’s Una virgen para Calígula and this film, written by the unholy trio of George Eastman, D’Amato and an uncredited Michele Soavi.

Caligula (David Brandon, Jubilee, Stagefright) has been having nightmares of being stalked and killed by a man with a bow and arrow. This does not stop him from continuing his aberrant life, filled with murder, lust, mayhem and well, everything that makes a Joe D’Amato movie.

The film starts with Domitius (Soavi) attacking Caligula and being beaten down and then ruined for life by having his tongue sliced off and the tendons of his legs cut. Caligula keeps him alive and tortures him with female slaves for most of the rest of the film. Our antagonist follows this by assaulting Livia in front of her new husband Aetius. After she commits suicide rather than be touched for one moment more, the crazed emperor kills her lover and blames it all on Christians, something the senators can’t believe.

Meanwhile, as the couple is buried on a beach, Miriam Celsia (Laura Gemser) proclaims herself a priestess of Anubis and claims that the Christians must forget their God and turn to her god of vengeance, burning their bodies and setting off for revenge. She sacrifices her virginity to Anubis in exchange for strength for her revenge and then somehow falls in love with Caligula and that’s not how that’s supposed to work.

But it does work — he ends up causing his own downfall, bringing the movie right back to its original nightmare.

The first two times this movie went before the rating board — which is absolutely hilarious that they were forced to watch this — it was kept out of theaters. 22 minutes of footage was removed, replaced by 15 minutes of tamer scenes — no more fellatio, no more real horseplay, no more nine minute orgy scene. Supposedly, there’s a two-hour plus cut and when you think, “Hey this is 85 minutes,” you can only imagine what was cut.

I always have a but with D’Amarto. Despite the sheer volume of manaical acts in this…but it’s gorgeous. Seriously, he’s making a film that looks as good — and at times better — than Brass’ better known and more overblown film. He has no pretense toward being an artist or intellectual. He just wants to make a movie that makes money, yet he’s talented in spite of himself, making a movie with underwater camera shots, effective dream scenes and huge tableaus of debauchery.

D’Amato used footage from this movie when he remade it in 1997 as the adult Caligola: Follia del potere. By that point, he wasn’t making movies like this any more, even if he was making movies like this.

You can now order this from Severin, whether you want a Caligula Bundle that comes with a coin, foto-comic and a copy of Bruno Mattei’s Caligula and Messalina or you can order it all by itself. I’m ready for that cleaned up Italian extended cut. Alert the authorities.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You all know we love Midnight enough that we reviewed it here on October 30, 2019 and even got a quote on the back of the new Severin release. But we’re all about more people getting into this movie. 

We’re also about new writers on the site, so say hello to Jason Kleeberg. We shared his Ultimate Guide to Christmas Horror and now we’re excited to have his first review on the site. 

Jason is the host, writer, producer, and editor of the Force Five Podcast. In addition to being a podcaster, he’s a Blacklist screenwriter (The Gumshoe, Powerbomb, Anglerfish), filmmaker (Clarks), and Telly Award winner (2005) from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s also an avid physical media collector. When Jason isn’t watching movies, he’s spending time with my wife, son and Xbox — not always in that particular order. This article originally ran on the Force Five site.

Fleeing her sexually abusive stepdad, Nancy hitches a ride with two guys heading west. Her goal is to get to California. At some point, the trio decides to stop and camp out in a town they were warned about, and run into a family who sacrifices people for Satanic purposes.

After watching Vinegar Syndrome’s release of The Laughing Dead, I decided I wanted to watch some more Satanic cult films and someone on Twitter recommended the recently released Midnight from Severin, also released in certain low budget theaters as The Backwoods Massacre. This was written and directed by John A. Russo, writer of the classic Night of the Living Dead, and with a tagline of “A Startling & Shocking Adventure – As Three College Students Take a Strange Detour to the Land of the LIVING DEAD!”, how could it disappoint? Well…it found a way. It’s slow, mean-spirited, and just generally uninteresting. The main draw for me watching this one was that Tom Savini had done the special effects for the picture, choosing the opportunity to work on this instead of Friday the 13th Part 2 which had me intrigued. Unfortunately, the bulk of the gore is machete throat cuts that look great, but are few and far between.

The opening scene in this extended cut is pretty promising – we hear some screams over an open field, only to discover a girl who’s been overpowered by a group of youngsters. Their mother looms over them, approving of their actions. Soon we cut to a satanic sacrifice, and I was legitimately intrigued. Unfortunately, that initial excitement will soon fade, as over half of the movie is a bland road trip. We spend an interminable amount of time with Tom and Hank, two guys who have clearly never seen a map of the United States because they agree to take Nancy from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania towards California on their way to Florida, barely tolerate her and duck local law enforcement because they’re stealing food from grocery stores along the way. The trio of bumpkins consists of two typical Deliverance yokels, a normal looking woman, and a rotund guy who does nothing but laugh as he saunters around the forest like a demonic Hamburglar possessed with the soul of a hyena. There’s really nothing that makes any of them stand out aside from Cyrus’s annoying cackling, although the reveal of their mother was pretty effective late in the film.

As a final girl, Nancy really doesn’t do much aside from tag along until she’s captured. Near the end she finally gets to fight back, but by then it was too little, too late, especially considering who comes to her rescue. For most of the movie, she’s either in the back of a van or in a dog cage. She leaves town after her drunk stepdad, played by Lawrence Tierney, tries to rape her. The scene is unsettling but it’s also backed by this low key, upbeat tune that you might hear in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, as if we’re not supposed to take it too seriously. She gets out of the situation by hitting him in the head with a portable radio with less force than it takes to loosen the lid on a jar of pickles. It was just a bad scene all around but perfectly sets the stage for the mediocrity ahead.

The film is full of stupid characters playing overt stereotypes and isn’t good enough to sit with the upper echelon of backwoods psycho films. Deliverance, The Last House on the Left, Southern Comfort, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were all obvious influences, but it never does anything new, fun or interesting with the premise. What we’re left with is a bland road trip movie that never gets as wild as it should have. This one is an easy skip.

The Severin disc looks nice (it was pulled from a fresh 4K scan of the original negative) and I think this is the first time this film has been released uncut in the United States (if anywhere). There are a few interviews included with the disc that I haven’t seen. Unfortunately it lacks any commentary tracks.

When I was a kid, my grandfather worked all night shifts at the mill and would come home in the middle of the night and crack open Pabst before anyone though that was cool and just watch war movie after war movie, the entire small house shaking and lit up by tracer fire and I could hear him laughing and having one heck of a time. And hey look — forty years later and here I am, watching a war movie from the Philippines and getting drunk.

A military squad commander has found a Red Book filled with military secrets, but the rebels attack and steal it and our hero’s girl, so he has to battle them all over again to get it back. There’s also a scene that features a long bit of the score from Raiders of the Lost Ark, so that book is not all that’s been taken illegally.

Also known as Task Force Alamid, this is a down and dirty effort. I mean, we’ve been doing these movies all week, but this is one of the lowest of the low ones when it comes to expenses. The VHS box is where most of the money — and the fake American acting names — went.

You can watch this on YouTube.

After a nuclear war, two men and one woman awaken in a deserted landscape unsure of how they arrived and unable to speak. One of the men and the woman are brother and sister who show up dressed as if they were attending a party when the end came, while the other man appears to be a tougher man, perhaps a biker.

Then, the crabs attack.

The stronger of the men destroys them and cracks open their shells so that everyone can eat before taking the woman while her brother can only watch. Soon, they’re joined by a gigantic dog who becomes bonded to the woman in ways that the men soon can only hope for, turning the entire film into an exploration of bestiality and incest and man’s inhumanity to man and animal, but all through the lens of art. Yet isn’t art just the right theater instead of the grindhouse.

This movie has taught me that if you piss on a dog, it will steal your woman.

But seriously, this is a surreal take on the end of the world movie and I’ve never seen anything like it. I honestly believe that I will never see another movie like it again either.

The Mondo Macabro release of this film has a brand new 4K transfer from the original film negative and an interview with director, writer and producer Eligio Herrero.

You can get this from Mondo Macabro.

Originally made as National Lampoon Goes to the Movies, this film sat for two years, perhaps to age like cheese, and was intended to be a parody of ten film and television genres. It ended up being three movies — a divorce story, a making-it-big movie and a cop caper. When it played a test screening in Rhode Island, the audience was so upset that they tore up the theater seats.

Yes, it wasn’t going well. And the disaster movie that was intended to be part of it — directed by Henry Jaglom — was completely taken out of the film despite being completed done. This threw the whole movie off time as it’s too short with only three parts.

“Growing Yourself” is about the divorce of the Coopers, Jason (Peter Riegert) and Susan (Candy Clark). It’s very late 70s and at this point, I figured that everyone making this was just doing coke — confirmed — and coasting thanks to Animal House, the Lampoon name, having an animated opening and getting Dr. John to do the theme. That said, Diane Lane is in this and that kind of made it better.

“Success Wanters” is about a woman (Ann Dusenberry, Jaws 2) who goes from exotic dancer to margarine magnate — Robert Culp has a heart attack and she gets it all — to First Lady. It’s kind of like those 40s rags to riches stories yet not good.

The last story, “Municipalians” teams a rookie cop (Robby Benson) with a crusty veteran (Richard Widmark) on the hunt for a serial killer (Christopher Lloyd). It’s worth just seeing the casting.

Bob Girladi directed the first two stories and Jaglom the final one. He’d been told by Orson Welles that he needed to do a studio movie. Well, after this one, never again.

While this movie isn’t all that funny or well made, it is a significant cultural artifact, the first film after the Lampoon made one of the most important comedy movies of all time and stumbled. For lovers of comedy, it’s at least worth that historical look.

National Lampoon’s Movie Madness is available from Kino Lorber.