A happily married graphic designer soon learns that his marriage isn’t all that happy, as his wife is cucking him with a man who dresses up in a woman’s white fish-net stockings. The married man goes insane and now feels the urge to dress up in women’s clothes and murder any woman who dares to wear the same white stockings. Now he has his sights set on a female disc jockey.

This movie’s a weird combination of giallo-infused slasher with romantic comedy, which I haven’t seen done before. It’s also packed with wacky moments, like a girl being born out of a slot machine in a stage show, directly followed by a kill that is lifted directly from Tenebre. He Lives By Night actually feels like a movie that has heard the “are DePalma and Argento aware of one another?” question and says, “What if we made a movie that’s all Dressed to Kill and split screens and hazy photography but with the neon hues of Bava’s best student?”

Making this a movie that’s suddenly shot up on my list of films is the fact that it has some of the most garish movie punks ever lensed by a camera. Have any punk rockers worn KISS makeup at any point other than in movies and All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling? Regardless, I love every minute of this and the scene where the two shoplifting punks are met by the killer is great.

I’ve also never seen a movie where the killer makes use of a 7-UP machine.

Just to settle the “Is it a giallo or slasher?” debate — spoiler warning — the bad guy goes through a window and falls to his doom, cementing its place in the former genre. But it’s really a movie all on its own, where despite the fumbling in the dark comedic cops, it succeeds.

Director Po-Chih Leong has had a wild career. Born in England, he made most of his early movies in Hong Kong, including Foxbat, which was written by Terence Young and stars Henry Silva. He also made the arty Jude Law vampire film The Wisdom of Crocodiles, the Canadian slasher Cabin by the Lake movies and even some action films with Wesley Snipes and Steven Segal (what JCVD was too busy to work with another HK director?) and a Joe Mantegna Spenser TV move before going back to Hong Kong to create The Jade Pendant, The Bounty Hunter and Baby Blues.

A killer that saves little girls from cars. An all-night talk show DJ who is also a nightclub showgirl. Ineffectual cops. Punks. Murder. Yes, He Lives by Night has it all and then some.

You can watch it on YouTube.

No, not the 1984 Wes Craven-directed, Susan Lucci-starring Invitation to Hell — which is great — but instead the British 1982 SOV movie!

Jackie has been invited to her high school reunion — which for some reason is a costume party, which I guess must be a British thing, UK readers please inform us — but because she’s a virgin, she’s selected as a sacrifice for the spring by the druids amongst her classmates.

Some dude tries to do our heroine the favor of taking away her virginity so that she survives, but then a latex-masked demon shows up and his eyes glow and he crucifies one character against a wall of Page 3 girls and then gorily pulls out his insides and hey — isn’t that why we watch movies? I mean, maybe isn’t that why I watch movies?

The same dude also wore an old-school paper Hulk mask for much of the early part of the movie, so copyrights — and the video nasty controversy which was going on at the time — be damned.

You know, I kind of like something in this movie. Like, I know it’s really bad but there’s something in it — and not just a young Demi Moore — that made me enjoy it. I have no idea what that was, but sometimes a movie just makes you feel like you’re taking a relaxing swim.

Sometime after the bombs got dropped, America is run by a criminal organization called the Merchants. To better control the population — and no, I have no idea how this plan is supposed to work — they get Dr. Paul Dean (Robert Glaudini, whose roles in movies like this and Cutting Class led him to somehow write the play Jack Goes Boating, which became a movie directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman) to create a parasite. Also, because this movie has no plan for what is about to happen, he infects himself to study the parasite, yet is upset when it infects the gang in the small town he finds himself trapped in.

And Demi plays the young lemon grower who helps him.

Actually, I’ve totally figured out why I like this movie. That’s because it cast Cherie Currie (the ex-Runaway who was on a run of scream queen roles between this, The Alchemist and The Twilight Zone: The Movie) as a post-apocalyptic gang member and Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith as a slave girl. And it was made by Charles Band between Crash! and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn in a time when he wasn’t yet making puppet movies.

A section 3 video nasty, this was in 3D in its original theatrical run. It owes just as big a debt to Alien as it does to Mad Max.

Elly Kenner was born in Israel and went from working in the advertising industry and movies to creating documentaries about healing, channeling and mysticism.

Norman Thaddeus Vaine wrote Herman’s Hermits’ film, Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter, as well as Lola — which has a romance between a forty-something porn writer Charles Bronson and a teen-something Susan George which seems like the most male fantasy movie of all time* — and directed Shadow of the Hawk and Frightmare.

Together, they would make The Black Room, a movie made at the very start of the AIDS crisis and the end of the free-loving 1970s. The world was about to get very different, and this movie was about to get very weird.

Larry (Jimmy Stathis) has decided that married life is dragging him down, so he rents a room somewhere in the Hollywood Hills from brother and sister Bridget (Cassandra Gava, who was the sorceress who made love to Arnold in Conan the Barbarian) and Jason (Stephen Knight, Necromancy).

Jason has a rare blood disorder, which means that he must constantly get blood transfusions, but perhaps he’s something more than human. After all, he and his sister have been capturing Larry’s partners and using them for their blood. And oh yeah, they’re watching him couple with them, too.

Much like the need for blood, Larry needs to be with other women. He loves telling his wife, Robin (Clara Perryman), his fantasies while they’re in bed together, and she goes along with the game until she learns that this is more than a fantasy. Now, once she discovers her husband’s secret apartment, she rents out her own place within the mansion.

Now, she’s not getting just the stories. She’s living them with Jason. Of course, when her husband discovers what’s happening, he’s enraged that she’s giving herself to others and demands that they both stop. But can you stop taking drugs and live an everyday life when you’ve had the rush of kink and secrets?

But now, Jason and Bridget are exacting their own penalty on the couple by taking their children. And even if they can die, the twosome keep returning to the dead because, as Robin wonders, “Can people like that ever die?”

Is this a furniture movie? Just look at the black room itself: black velvet curtains, wax candles burning and a glowing table. Sexy, right? Well, one thing is for sure: this is a section 3 video nasty, a movie that lingers on scenes of needles, track marks and blood.

The thing is, in the hopes of getting back to the sexual life they had before kids and suburbia, our protagonists must be unwilling accessories to the murders of prostitutes, all blood for the veins of someone whose own source has become contaminated. You know, I would prefer this film if it was never supernatural and was just creepy, with a brother and sister who sleep with one another and suddenly date a married couple who they drag deeper and deeper into hell.

Two more reasons to love this: an impossibly young Linnea Quigley as the couple’s babysitter and an incredibly youthful Christopher McDonald—yes, Shooter McGavin—as the college student who watches Larry take his woman while he writes about it for his doctoral thesis because, yes, the 70s.

The copy I found is as dark and beat up as possible. And you know, I might love that this is how I’m watching this instead of a pristine blu ray boutique reissue because I’m seeing something that so many have watched over and over, battering the original until what ended up online was the last media itself’s last gasp.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this was written, Vinegar Syndrome has released it on Blu-ray.)

In Nightmare USA — thanks to Hidden Films for bringing this up — Vane revealed that The Black Room was based on his real life, as he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. Wow, huh?

*It’s totally based on Vane’s life. He married 16-year-old model Sarah Caldwell in the mid-1960s, when he was 38.

You can listen to the podcast I did on this film on YouTube.

Where could Steve Martin and Carl Reiner go after The Jerk and The Man with Two Brains? How about to the world of film noir?

At lunch with Reiner and screenwriter George Gip, Martin discussed using a clip from an old film as part of a story he was writing. From that came the idea to use old clips throughout a movie to remix, recut and reframe an entirely new narrative that would place Martin into the world of film noir, using some of those that helped make those classic films, like costume designer Edith Head*, who made more than twenty suits and production designer John DeCuir, who designed 85 sets for the film.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid casts Martin as Rigby Reardon, who comes to the aid of cheese heiress Juliet Forrest (Sela Ward) after the mysterious death of her father. Throughout the narrative, they come into contact with all manner of famous actors and characters, including Alan Ladd as The Exterminator who attacks Martin (taken from This Gun for Hire), Barbara Stanwyck from Sorry, Wrong Number, Ray Milland from The Lost Weekend, Ava Gardner footage taken from both The Killers and The Bribe, Burt Lancaster from The Killers, Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe using scenes from The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place and Dark Passage, Cary Grant from Suspicion, Ingrid Bergman from Notorious, Veronica Lake** from The Glass Key, Bette David from Deception, Lana Turner footage from Johnny Eager and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Edward Arnold from Johnny Eager, Kirk Douglas from Walk Alone, Fred MacMurray from Double Indemnity, James Cagney from White Heat, Joan Crawford from Humoresque and Charles Laughton and Vincent Price from The Bribe. Whew!

These eighteen movies*** — plus footage shot at Culver City’s Laird International Studios, the same place where Suspicion, Rebecca and Spellbound were all made — creates a narrative all its own, much how beats and samples come together to make a new song within the world of hip hop.

There’s so much detail in this movie, which is because of the talents of the filmmakers, including  director of photography Michael Chapman , who worked with Technicolor to seamlessly match the old film clips with his new footage.

I find it really intriguing that Martin came out of another period piece, Pennies from Heaven, into this movie, while Sela Ward played the woman at the center of the modern noir Sharky’s Machine before this.

The new blu ray re-release of this movie from Kino Lorber includes new commentary by filmmaker Allan Arkush and film historian/filmmaker Daniel Kremer, as well as four radio commercials, three TV ads, a theatrical trailer and the Buttometer teaser trailer. I’m beyond excited to have this movie in my library.

* *The film was dedicated to Head, who died soon after it was completed, with the credits saying, “To her, and to all the brilliant technical and creative people who worked on the films of the 1940’s and 1950’s, this motion picture is affectionately dedicated.”

**Cheryl Rainbwaux Smith also was the double for Lake in this scene, which I heartily endorse.

*** Nineteen if you count the car crash in the beginning, which came from Keeper of the Flame.

“Beyond the five senses lies a sixth. To possess it is to see the unseen. If she sees you…you’re dead.” That’s a pretty great tagline. This is kind of a sleeper of a film.

Armand Mastroianni (He Knows You’re Alone, The Supernaturals, plenty of stuff for the Hallmark Channel like their Pandemic mini-series) made this one and while he has an Italian name, he was born in Brooklyn. But the roots of this film are firmly in the world of the giallo, at least the later fantastic era and less in the early detective films.

Handcuffed bodes have been showing up all over New York City — yes, the end of the world NYC as seen in films like The Eyes of Laura Mars and The New York Ripper — which leads talk show host Paul “Mac” McCormack (Perry King) and police detective/stand-up comedian Larry Weeks (Norman Parker) to team up. They soon meet Virna Nightbourne (He Knows You’re Alone, Sticky Fingers), an art student whose work somehow perfectly captures details of the crimes that even the police don’t know.

I mean, in case if you’re wondering, as I always do, “Is this a giallo?” just the idea that a cop is also a comedian and the name Virna NIghtbourne should tell you all that you need to know.

Virna is able to basically switch off her brain and free her hand to draw whatever it wants, a talent that led her to rescue a young girl named Elizabeth many years ago. The police have to tell her the horrible news that Elizabeth was one of the Handcuff Killer’s victims, which is a strange coincidence or because this is a giallo.

Now, Virna is having dreams of being tied to a bed and murdered, turning that scene into her art. At the same time, other people who were close to Elizabeth, like a male prostitute, are being killed and even Mac is attacked in his apartment by a man paid to attack him. He’s shot by the police before he can give them any further answers.

Somehow, our heroine begins dating both men and stands up Mac one night to see Larry perform stand-up (it’s the comic strip and you can see Dennis Wolfberg’s act) when she gets a call that the killer has her roommate tied up to a car and plans on murdering her. She runs outside and is nearly hit by the Handcuff Killer’s car.

Mac brings Virna on his show and she starts to draw a murder that is paralleled by Muriel being murdered by being handcuffed and bound before being placed in a car that crashes into the river. She’s gotten too close, so she’s kept with Mac, but the drawings, when analyzed, show that she’s not out of danger yet.

The clues all make sense in this — American giallo feels the need to explain things a bit better than their Italian counterparts — and it gets pretty boring before the psychic parts come out. Then again, ask yourself: how many old Hollywood romantic triangles infused into a police procedural with giallo elements are you going to find? Throw some Perry King in as the smoldering sizzle on the steak and hey, you won’t be too upset that you spent time watching this.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from Blue Underground under its alternate title, The Killing Hour. It’s also a category III video nasty, which you can find on our list of these infamous films.

Let me tell you what, punks in movies that look nothing like real life punks? Now that’s my thing. Sure, Repo Man gets it right. But what about stuff like La Venganza de los Punks? I want huge colored mohawks and a near end of this world vibe and man, what the heck is going on with this movie, also known as Wild Sex of the Children of the Night?

At some point in the future — let’s be all Capcom and call it 19XX — two punk gangs are going to get all into The Warriors and start cosplaying it and taking things way too far. Actually, there are a whole bunch of gangs like The Ladies, The Rats, The Babies and The Dragos, as well as a man called Big Cat who is kind of like the future punk Batman that exists outside the gangs, standing for something other than sex, drugs and death.

There’s also a version of this with sex inserts called Sexo Selvagem dos Filhos da Noite (Night Children’s Wild Sex). Everybody in this wears fur, has facepaint and often Road Warriors-style shoulder pads. So yeah, Brazil, everybody. Well done.