Paul Kersey can’t catch a break. Seriously, in this sequel, he goes through the Trials of Job all over again. You think he went through some bad stuff in the first movie? Michael Winner is just getting started putting our vigilante hero through hell on earth.

Paul has taken his daughter Jordan and moved to Los Angeles, where he’s found love again with radio reporter Geri Nichols (Bronson’s wife, Jill Ireland). However, horror and pain is never far from Kersey, so one day at a fair, some punks steal his wallet. He chases one of them down named Jiver down and teaches him a lesson. The gang — Nirvana, Punkcut, Stomper and Cutter (Laurence Fishburne) — find his address in his wallet and pay a visit to his house. They rape his housekeeper Rosario, beat Paul into la la land and steal his daughter (this time played by Robin Sherwood from Tourist Trap). After raping her, she goes even deeper into her depression and jumps out a window, falling to her death and getting impaled like she’s Nikos Karamanlis or Niko Tanopoulos.

Of course, Paul doesn’t need help from the cops. He only needs one thing: to give in to the rage within, to become the vigilante once more. Det. Frank Ochoa is back to chase him one more time, as he’s the only one who can track him.

Soon, Paul is wiping out the gang one by one, his own personal safety and relationship with Geri be damned. This is the first time we discover that Kersey is able to do magical things like make fake IDs with just a Xerox machine and talk his way into anywhere and out of anything. By the end of this film, he’s gone from a man whose life has been destroyed to a walking angel of death willing to do whatever it takes to kill everyone that’s crossed him.

To be as authentic as possible, this movie was shot in the sleaziest parts of Los Angeles, such as the abandoned and crumbling Hollywood Hotel location. Many of the film’s extras were local color who were either hired to play a bit part or just walked over to the set, such as drug addicts, drag queens, Hare Krishnas and bikers. Even crazier, Bronson’s alcoholic brother was a frequent set visitor, constantly asking for money. Bronson wanted to be careful not to give him too much cash so that he wouldn’t be mugged, but that brother was soon found dead, stabbed in the ass.

My favorite part of this was the score, composed by Jimmy Page in his first post-Led Zeppelin musical appearance here by creating the film’s soundtrack. It’s almost surreal to hear his signature guitar tone over Bronson killing rapists.

You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime or order the blu ray from Shout! Factory.

If you think the United States is in bad shape today, perhaps you should check out this film, made well beyond the news bubble and the 24/7 headline cycle. The 1970’s were fucking bleak.

If you thought mass shooters were because of video games or that we just suddenly became a more violent society, sit through this movie. It’s brutal. It will assault you. It will take your name. It will own you.

Director Sheldon Renan suffered from depression for a year after he finished this film, as was editor Lee Percy. Even the John Lennon vigil at the end, added at the request of Japanese producers to help the movie end on a positive note, had people shoot at one another. That ending is somehow even more downbeat than anything else, after a movie where Sirhan Sirhan cries about killing RFK and you see more of the Zapruder film than you knew existed.

How destroyed was Renan? He went on to write the screenplay for 1990’s Lambada. What the actual fuck.

The voice of this film is incredible and it comes from Chuck Riley, who did the voiceovers for these trailers: The Godfather, Child’s Play 2, Die Hard and many more.

The writing comes from Leonard Schrader, brother of Taxi Driver writer Paul, who was inspired to do this movie after writing a film called Hollow Point for Roger Corman. As he researched that movie, he met so many hitmen and spent so much time with them, he learned exactly how killers planned and executed hits.

There’s even a one-on-one interview with the Edmund Kemper, where he calmly discusses killing his mother and young women. That said — the goal of this film isn’t Mondo Cane exploitation.

According to a New Republic article, it wanted to erase the line between killers and the audience. Renan said Schrader “wanted to turn the audience into murderers. He wanted [viewers] to recognize that in themselves, ostensibly so that they would do something about it.”

As they worked on the film, Reagan and Lennon were both shot. Things did not get better. Things are bad now. So often I use film to hide from reality, but this movie makes you face it.

There is a lot here I never knew about, like Tony Kiritsis, an Indiana man who held a mortgage broker hostage while hosting a press conference in the most polite manner possible. Of course, he also had a shotgun wired to the man’s head that was ready to go off if he was shot by the police.

Some feel that this movie glamorizes the killers. I would refute that and say that it makes you see the senselessness of their action. As the former president of a Zen meditation center, Renan gave them a forum because he believed that “you just have to feel compassion for everybody — you just do. I do, anyway. For me, it was a journey into the depths to try to get some understanding.”

This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. It’s sobering. It’s maddening. And it approaches art.

This film was never released, distributed, televised, or made available for sale in the USA until it finally received an official release from Severin Films. You can also watch it on Amazon Prime. 

This movie 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. 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 and a priest even gets crucified. What are they waiting for? And then Catch Dog tries to rape one of the survivors! You guys are the heroes? Well, at least they kick him out after that.

That girl ends up being 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An alien is hovering in the sky above New York City, extracting the endorphins produced by the brain when an orgasm occurs. With each happy ending, someone is murdered, all so the alien can use that energy for…well, I’m not really sure. There’s also plenty of drugs, punk rock, synthesizers, fashion shows and face paint. It’s pretty much perfect.

It all starts at a fashion show in a nightclub where we meet two models, Margaret and Jimmy, who are both bisexual and addicted to fame and cocaine. They’re both played by Anne Carlisle, who was also Victoria in Desperately Seeking Susan. Neither of them has any money to pay for those drugs and they’re constantly at one another’s throats.

Jimmy’s mother, Sylvia, is a TV producer who somehow comes into the orbit of German scientist Johann Hoffman, who is the only person on Earth who understands how the aliens work. And how they work is by killing each person who has had an orgasm with Margaret and making a crystal come out of their heads. Where once she doesn’t believe that these deaths are her fault, by the end, she’s yelling things like “I kill with my cunt!” and taking out men who have wronged her.

Shot in the U.S. by a small Russian production team, Liquid Sky may as well have been beamed down from space. It feels like it came out of the New York club scene with places like Danceteria and groups like Michael Alig’s clubkids. Even its title is slang for heroin.

You can take this as a memento of New York in the 80’s or a science fiction infused comedy. Or both.

Vinegar Syndrome has recently re-released this film along with a 50-minute documentary about the film. You can also watch it on Amazon Prime and Shudder. We featured Liquid Sky — with a second look — as part of our weekly “Drive-In Friday” featurettes with a tribute to the old USA Network’s “Night Flight” programming block from the ’80s.

When Becca and I first started dating, we looked for this movie on DVD everywhere.  That’s when we learned one of the mysteries of collecting films. Once you find something, it seemingly shows up everywhere.

The Entity was directed by Sidney J. Furie (Iron Eagle, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and written by Frank De Felitta (who wrote Audrey Rose and The Edict, which was filmed as Z.P.G. He also directed Dark Night of the Scarecrow). It was based on the true story of Doris Bither, who alleged that the ghosts of three Asian men were raping her.

Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey, Insidious) is a single mother who is continually attacked by a poltergeist who rapes her and then tries to kill her at every turn, including taking control of her car in traffic. She tries to work with Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver, one of the best heels ever in a rare babyface role) to solve her issues.

There’s a bonkers scene here where a room of smoking male doctors mansplain away the ghost rape and insult her every step of the way. After all, Carla has endured sexual and physical abuse, teenage pregnancy and the motorcycle riding death of her first husband.

But how can you explain away the fact that she’s been attacked in front of her kids and scientific witnesses? That the ghost zapped her son with electrical energy? Or that her boyfriend (Alex Rocco!) has even seen these attacks?

That’s when the movie descends into madness. Parapsychologists create a model version of her home as a trap, with liquid helium to freeze the entity. It tries to turn the experiment on her, but the doctor saves her and there’s a brief moment where we can see the entity trapped in ice before it vanishes.

The next day, she comes home only to have the front door open by itself and a demonic voice say, “Welcome home, cunt”. Unlike every character in any horror movie before or since, she calmly opens the door, walks outside and drives away with her kids.

There’s a disclaimer at the end that says “The film you have just seen is a fictionalized account of a true incident which took place in Los Angeles, California, in October 1976. It is considered by psychic researchers to be one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of parapsychology. The real Carla Moran is today living in Texas with her children. The attacks, though decreased in both frequency and intensity…continue.”

Interestingly enough, Sidney J. Furie dropped an entire dream sequence and plot thread from The Entity which featured Carla being forced by the entity to have incestuous thoughts about her own son. David Labiosa (who played Carla Moran’s teenage son Billy) said that those aspects were too controversial and sex-charged for the early 1980’s. I guess he’s never seen Amityville II: The Possession!

The Entity is a scary, rough and only in the early 1980’s horror movie. The actual attacks are brutal in their intensity and the sound design of each scene sound like staccato bursts of industrial noise. It’s well-worth hunting down. But be warned! Once you find it, you’ll find it everywhere!

Before directing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI – a divisive film in the series due to its humor but also one of the better Friday films — Tom McLoughlin wrote for Dick Van Dyke, worked with Woody Allen on his science fiction comedy Sleeper, appeared as the robot S.T.A.R. in The Black Hole and played the Katahdin in Prophecy. This is the first film he directed and it’s been somewhat forgotten over the years.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and a vacation that took him Paris’ catacombs, McLoughlin and writer Michael Hawes spent four years trying to sell this movie to studios before finding a group of Mormon investors who demanded that the movie start production within three weeks. Unfortunately, the film was also taken out of McLoughlin’s hand and his original ending was nixed. What remains is still pretty good, however.

Karl Raymarseivich Raymar has killed at least six women — all found within his apartment — but the Russian occultist is now dead. As he’s taken away, electricity comes out of his body. Samuel Dockstader (Donald Hotton, The Hearse) tells Raymar’s daughter Olivia and husband Allan (Adam West) that her father had become a psychic vampire that fed off the bioelectricity of the young women that he had kidnapped.

Then there’s a snobby clique of mean girls called The Sisters — Carol, Kitty and Leslie (teenage crush E.G. Daily, who was Dottie in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Baby Doll in Streets of Fire, as well as being part of the band in Better Off Dead and providing the voice for the pig Babe and Tommy Pickles for Nickelodeon’s Rugrats). Julie Wells (Meg Tilly, Psycho II) wants to be part of the cub, but she’s also dating Carol’s ex-boyfriend Steve. To get revenge, The Sisters send her to spend one night alone in a mausoleum before she can be part of their group.

Carol and Kitty dress up and chase Julie, who hides in the chapel as Raymar awakens, opening coffins and vaults filled with the dead. Soon those reanimated corpses surround the popular twosome and murder them.

Everyone converges on the mausoleum — Steve wants to rescue Julie and Olivia wants her father’s powers. Can our young lovers survive? Will Olivia gain the vampiric energies of her father? Will lots of shambling corpses make scary noises and stagger all about?

One Dark Night was actually finished long before Poltergeist, a film that its special effects were often compared to. In fact, they both use real skeletons for some of their corpses. But production issues kept the film out of theaters long enough that it seemed to come off as a copycat.

I’d been looking for this film for some time, so I was happy to be able to finally get to see it thanks to Amazon Prime. It’s fun, quick and filled with jump scares — everything a decent horror film should be. You can also get the Code Red DVD at Ronin Flix.

King Cromwell (Richard Lynch, Bad Dreams, God Told Me To) has come the whole way to Tomb Island to find Xusia (Richard Moll, contractually obligated to be in all 1980’s sword and sorcery movies, although a bad reaction to the contacts needed for his makeup caused Moll to only physically appear in the opening scene), a dead sorcerer who holds the key to defeating King Richard.

But Cromwell realizes that Xusia will turn against him, so he stabs the demonic magician and chases him off a cliff. He doesn’t need him any longer — he’s destroyed all of his enemy’s army. Prince Talon arrives just in time to watch his father die, but doesn’t lose his family’s sword, a triple-bladed number that shoots blades. He’s going to need it to avenge the deaths of his mother and father.

Eleven years later and Talon (now played by Lee Horsely, TV’s Matt Houston) leads a group of mercenaries back to the country of his birth, ready to get his revenge. And oh yeah — Xusia is still around.

Cromwell attacks the city of Edhan, taking Prince Mikah (Simon MacCorkingdale, Jaws 3D) captive and nearly getting his sister Alana too, before she is saved by Talon, who also agrees to rescue her brother if he can have her for one night.  Of course, as soon as our hero leaves, Alana gets taken by Cromwell.

Talon rescues Mikah, but is captured by Cromwell, who forces Alana to marry him. He invites the four neighboring kings to the ceremony, where he’s crucified Talon (obviously Conan the Barbarian was an influence). But our hero is insanely strong and he pulls himself off the crucifix as Mikah and his soldiers attack the castle (one of them, Phillip, is Reb Brown from Yor, Hunter from the Future).

Cromwell takes Alana to the castle’s dungeons, where his second-in-command Machelli reveals himself to be Xusia. Talon uses his sword to defeat him, then bests Cromwell in mortal combat. Finally, a giant snake attacks Alana, but Talon saves her and defeats Xusia again.

Talon might be the rightful heir, but he gives his crown to Mikah, then gets what he really wants: Alana. After a night of what we can only imagine is some solid cocksmanship (and perhaps a marital aid that works just like his sword), he and his men do a collective group walk of shame as they head out looking for new adventure.

The end of the film promises “Watch for Talon’s Next Adventure Tales of an Ancient Empire,” but a sequel would not appear until 2012.

Despite being rated R, the cheapo toy company Fleetwood released both miniature figures and a replica sword from the film!

This is probably Albert Pyun’s (Cyborg) best film. It’s fun, quick and filled with plenty of swordfights and blood. Is it great? No, of course not. It’s an 80’s VHS rental that you watch with your favorite substances and yell at the screen. What’s not to enjoy?

It’s also impossible to find. Or you could get your copy just like I got mine — from the fine folks at the VHSPS. There’s also a RiffTrax version available on Amazon Prime.

Let’s list the reasons why this movie made it to our site:

Joe D’Amato directed it. Where do we even start with his filmography? Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals? Antropophagus? Endgame?

It’s an Italian ripoff of Conan the Barbarian, which means it’s going to be at the same time better, worse and more inventive than the movie that inspired it.

It’s written by Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect, Cemetery Man)!

Once, Ator was just a baby, born with the birthmark that prophesied that he’d grow up to destroy the Spider Cult, whose leader Dakar (a pro wrestler who appeared in Titanes en el Ring against Martín Karadagian) tries to kill before he even gets out of his chainmail diapers.

Luckily, Ator is saved and grows up big, strong and weirdly in love with his sister, Sunya. It turns out that luckily, he’s adopted, so this is only morally and not biologically upsetting. His father allows them to be married, but the Spider Cult attacks the village and takes her, along with several other women.

Ator trains with Griba, the warrior who saved him as a child (he’s played by Edmund Purdom, the dean from Pieces!). What follows are pure shenanigans — Ator is kidnapped by Amazons, almost sleeps with a witch, undertakes a quest to find a shield and meets up with Roon (Sabrina Siani, Ocron from Fulci’s batshit barbarian opus Conquest), a sexy blonde thief who is in love with him.

Oh yeah! Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, shows up here too.

Ator succeeds in defeating Dakkar, only to learn that the only reason that Griba mentored him was to use him to destroy his enemy. That said, Ator defeats him too, leaving him to be eaten by the Lovecraftian-named Ancient One, a monstrous spider. But hey, Ator isn’t done yet. He kills that beast too!

Finally, learning that Roon has died, Ator and Sunya go back to their village, ready to make their incestual union a reality. Or maybe not, as she doesn’t show up in the three sequels, The Blade Master, Iron Warrior and Quest for the Magic Sword.

Ator is played by Miles O’Keefe, who started his Hollywood career in the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man, a movie that Richard Harris would nearly fist fight people over if they dared to bring it up. He’s in all but the last of these films and while D’Amato praised his physique and attitude, he felt that his fighting and acting skills left something to be desired.

Ator the Fighting Eagle pretty much flies by. It does what it’s supposed to do — present magic, boobs, sorcery and swordfights — albeit in a PG-rated film. It’s anything except boring and you can check it out for yourself on Amazon Prime.

It takes a lot for me to say that a movie is horrible. I am here today to tell you that Wacko is a horrible, horrible movie. Imagine — with all I have seen — what that entails.

13 years ago, Mary Graves’ (Stephanie from TV’s Newhart) older sister was killed on Halloween by a lawn mowing killer. Now she sees mowers everywhere, but tonight, she just wants to go to her prom. Can she avoid the pumpkin masked killer? Can Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker, Mitchell, The Pack) save her?

This is a film packed with actors you may or may not love filmed, lit and treated poorly. The film is so dark that daylight scenes appear shot night for day. It redefines the term shoddy. Where Airplane! works because it allows actors like Robert Stack and Peter Graves to be themselves while chaos explodes around them, everyone in this film acts as if Lloyd Kaufmann were dosing them with laughing gas.

George Kennedy deserves better, despite his appearances in Airplane 1979: The Concorde and The Uninvited. Stella Stevens deserves better. Fuck, even  Andrew Clay, before he became Dice (a character he first played in the film Making the Grade), deserves better. So do E.G. Daily (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), Anthony James (The Chauffer from Burnt Offerings!), Jeff Altman (who also appeared in the utter piece of shit TV series The Pink Lady and Jeff) and anybody who somehow ended up connected in this mess.

I place the blame at the feet of Jensen Farley Pictures, who also rewarded us with pieces of dreck like Madman, Joysticks (yes, I see you in that movie too, Joe Don Baker) and Homework (yet I still love you, Joan Collins). PS – my thrift store has had a DVD of that and Private Lessons for a few weeks that I know I’ll end up buying). They did bring us Curtains, but at what cost?

Greydon Clark also bears the brunt of the blame. I mean, did he hate George Kennedy or something? He directed him here and also in the aforementioned The Uninvited, a movie about a mutant military weapon housecat. And oh yeah, Joysticks also comes from him. As does Final Justice, proving he hates Joe Don Baker as much — if not so much more — than George Kennedy. He also was behind Without Warning, the 1980 movie that features an alien hunter played by Kevin Peter Hall who is looking for human trophies. You may say, “Hey, that’s Predator.” You’d be right. And this movie came out seven years before that one.

Notice how I’ve done anything but talk about Wacko? That’s because this movie is a piece of absolute fecund drivel that makes movies like King Frat and Movie 43 look like Citizen Kane. I stopped it at 28:00 in, thinking the film had to be over 19 hours long and was shocked at how much pain it had put me through. Please don’t watch it on Amazon Video. No matter how much you want to.