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.

The first movie in Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy — followed by Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi — this combines Ron Fricke’s cinematography and Philip Glass’s score to create a feeling of zen or restlessness, depending on how it is viewed. There are no words as Reggio said, “…it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.” Instead, the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi is all we know, which means “life out of balance.”

Reggio and Fricke met when the director was working on a media campaign for the Institute for Regional Education and the American Civil Liberties Union. These ads were about how technology controls the world and invades our privacy. The TV spots were so popular people called stations to see when they would air again; it was also successful in that it got ritalin eliminated as a behavior controlling drug in New Mexico schools. Afterward, with just $40,000 left in his budget, Fricke told Reggio that they should make a film.

Shot with a mix of styles and media — 16mm, 35mm made with a 16 mm zoom lens shot on to 35 mm film with a zoom extender, time lapse photography, captured stills in New York’s Time Square with chemicals changing up the results, the New York traffic and congestion time lapse work of cinematographer Hilary Harris and even images added of the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon by Francis Ford Coppola, who became a champion of the movie —  Koyaanisqatsi is about giving you an experience. The director has even said that what the movie is about is up to you. It ends with these three prophecies:

• “If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.”
• “Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.”
• “A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

I was ten years old when Blade Runner came out and it played theaters so briefly in my small hometown that I never got the chance to see it. Also, ten year olds didn’t get to see R rated films in 1982. So my first experience was reading the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson Marvel Comics adaptation, a book of which I literally read until the cover came off.

I must have read this issue a thousand times.

Steranko cover!

I also asked my uncle, a librarian, for a copy of Philip K. DIck’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Perhaps a ten-year-old was not yet ready for the complexity of Philip K. Dick, but he never dumbed it down for me.

The first time I finally saw Blade Runner on HBO it was after a year of reading about the film in Starlog, obsessing over the comic book and the source novel, so my experience was so alien to anyone else that saw it in theaters in 1982.

For a movie seen as a failure — it made $41.6 million on a $30 million budget, so I have no idea how that is failure — this is a movie that literally changed the world and has grown to become our world.

And yet, this is a movie that has seven different versions thanks to all of the changes from studio executives. Even the voiceover, which was added by them, has star Harrison Ford reading the words as if he has no interest, perhaps hoping if they were bad they’d never be used.

The blade runner is former police officer Rick Deckard (Ford), who is charged by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) with doing what he does best: hunting down robotic humanoids and retiring them. Now, he must stop four Nexus-6 replicants: Leon  Kowalski (Brion James), Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

Yet within this film noir story set in a neon-filled future straight out of a Moebius drawing, the real tale is about whether Rick and his lover Rachael (Sean Young) are humans or machines themselves. In fact, of all the characters, Batty is the most human of them all, a character of both deep menace and surprising tender thoughts.

Blade Runner arises from pain. Ridley Scott had left Dune and lost his brother in short order and wanted something to take his mind off life. Dick had no idea it was even being made, but his initial distrust was saved somewhat when he saw the script revisions and special effects footage. Ford and Scott also fought throughout.

Neither can agree if Deckard is human or replicant, even if they’ve made up.

I think about Blade Runner a lot. I think about Pris flipping across the room, how her face paint looks, how deadly these killing machines are with such grace. I think of Rutger Hauer ad-libbing “All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain” and caressing the dove. I remember the spinner police car and Deckard’s car that I had as a kid and played with constantly. And I wonder, does Gaff leave the silver unicorn after not killing Rachael as him telling Deckard to pursue his dream or is Deckard’s dream of the unicorn just one programmed into him?

Most of all, I’m so thankful for this movie because without it, I may not be so fascinated by Philip K. Dick, a person who I quote or reference every day. My uncle knew what he was doing.

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. 

The story of X may have been three years early, but the video revolution — driven, as all technology is, by sex — changed the world of pornography, moving it from the fleshpots of 42nd Street and dirty book stores into suburban living rooms. In 1982, there was still the glimmer of hope that the Golden Age of Porn — that starts with Bill Osco’s Mona and ends sometime around 1984 or so with The Dark Brothers’ 1984 mind-twisting New Wave Hookers — would find new life, better budgets and a more appreciative audience.

Yet videotape would open up adult for everyone and by the 90s, few films had a storyline, instead given to gonzo explorations of “can you top this” madness with few exceptions, such as the output of John Stagliano (who may have popularized gonzo, but could also create a coherent and interesting narrative film like Buda), the glossy Michael Ninn glamour movies, Andrew Blake’s Night Trips, Phillip Mond’s Zazel, John Leslie’s Chameleons and Curse of the Cat Woman, the aforementioned Dark Brothers and ridiculous parodies of existing films.

Yet in 1982, a movie could be made that transcends its adult origins and uses them to make you as the viewer complicit in the action on screen.

Stephen Sayadian only made seven adult films (this film, as well as two sequels to Nightdreams, two Untamed Cowgirls of the Wild West and two Party Doll-a-Go-Go films which take the staccato editing and weird dialogue to its absurd limit on sets that had to cost absolutely nothing yet with a cast of all-stars such as Raven, Madison Stone, Patricia Kennedy, Bionca, Jeanna Fine, Nikki Wilde and Tianna Collins and yes, I wrote that from memory) as well as the somewhat spiritual sequel — or at least next steo — to this movie, the mainstream — yet still delightfully insane — Dr. Caligari. A veteran of advertising and design — he worked on the posters for The Fog, The Funhouse, Ms. 45 and Dressed To Kill which took inspiration from the iconic The Graduate poser — Sayadian used the alter ego of Rinse Dream to make his films, much as Gregory Dark would adopt a new name for his porn changing efforts.

The script — yes, adult movies can have a script — was written by Herbert W. Day, who is really Pittsburgh native Jerry Stahl, the son of a coal miner who later became Pennsylvania attorney general and a federal judge. He found that he had a talent for writing short stories, was the humor editor for Hustler and also discovered a love of hardcore drugs. To fuel that, he started writing for TV shows like Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, Thirtysomething, Northern Exposure and, perhaps most intriguingly, ALF. He’s also written ten episodes of CSI which have been the most aberrant examples of that show to middle America, which is wild as he introduced viewers of the grandparent network CBS to furries, infantilism, a measured story about transgendered people and introduced Lady Heather, the potential bad girl love interest of lead Gil Grissom, who was played by Return of the Living Dead III star Melinda Clarke. His autobiographical novel Permanent Midnight was a success and made into a movie starring Ben Stiller.

Years after a nuclear war, nearly every survivor is a Negative, often shambling zombie-like humans who become vomitous if they attempt to copulate. To attempt any hope at remembering what human contact was like, they come to Café Flesh, a place where Positives make love while they watch, often engaging in surrealist scenes that defy the ability of the viewer to become titillated.

That’s the point. Where the goal of nearly all pornography is to get the viewer off, Cafe Flésh casts you as a Negative, stuck at home with no one next to you, as far from true warmth and, well, flesh as the puking crowd — Richard Beltzer is one of them — gathered to watch and watch and watch.

It also feels like the vaudevillian stage of the men’s club gone to Hell, as Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols, who also played the doctor in Nightdreams) introduces live sex acts with people dressed as rats or milkmen surrounded by men dressed as demonic babies. Even the typical jerk-off scenario of a female oil tycoon lies with a gigantic pencil while her secretary repeatedly intones, “Do you want me to type a memo?”

Is the film making light of the fact that male performers had often become interchangeable, their faces are obscured for most of the movie?

Angel (Marie Sharp) came from Wyoming, where they found that she was Positive and she’s been forced into the slavery of the club, performing with each man that they bring on stage. However, one of the audience members, Lana (Michele Bauer, using her Pia Snow name here before she would go on to appear in so many horror movies like Demonwarp, Evil Toons, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Jess Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein and Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula In Eight Legs to Love You) has been keeping have Positive diagnosis a secret as she doesn’t want to hurt her boyfriend Nick. Yet as she watches the famous Positive Johnny Rico (Kevin James, who speaking of nuclear war is also in the porn parody Dr. Strange Sex) — someone liked Robert Heinlein — go through his motions with Angel,  her frustrations take hold and she takes the stage.

Screen Slate has an amazing article that details the music of this movie, which Sayadian describes as “…like an Elmer Bernstein score from the ’50s, only played with the most modern synthesizers available at the time. I thought: old vibe, new technology.” There’s a lot to learn about composer Mitchell Froom — and the rest of the film’s creators — at that site.

By the way — Sayadian didn’t direct Rockwell’s “Someone’s Watching Me” video. That would be  Francis Delia, who directed Nightdreams as F.X. Pope. Seeing as how Stahl and Sayadian wrote that movie, I can see how some may make the mistake. Delia was a producer on this film as well as the director of photography.

Café Flesh isn’t for someone who is looking to get off. I can’t even imagine those that were confronted by it in adult theaters, as it punches you in the face with its AIDS allegory while daring you to find a single erotic thing in it. Strangely enough, I’d always heard that an R-rated edit was made so that mainstream audiences would see it at midnight shows, but Sayadian stated — in the above linked Screen Slate piece — that the movie was an “R-rated movie, funded by X-rated people” and that he was forced to add the sex scenes by the money men behind the budget.

He said, “I got financing from three guys — two were hardcore producers and one was a Harvard business grad who somehow got lost in the porno world.” After adding in the adult scenes, he told Froom, “I want you to extend some of these pieces because we may have to put porn in there. And all I can say is, I want the music to be as disturbing as possible. I don’t want it to be hot or sexy or anything like that.”

That said, the moans of joy that came from this movie show up in a place that many have heard them, White Zombie’s Blade Runner quoting song  — “Yeah I am the nexus one I want more life” — “More Human than Human.”

Severin is releasing this to retail on November 26, 2024. Until now, it has only been available on their site.

The most elusive, requested and unapologetically unhinged Penne Post-Apocalypse epic of all is finally available, uncut and uncensored on disc for the first time ever from Severin. Directed by Joe D’Amato, written by George Eastman and assistant directed by Michele Soavi, this stars Al Cliver, Peter Hooten, Sabrina Siani, Geretta Geretta and Donald O’Brien in an all-star — in my world — end of teh world bit of insanity.

It’s scanned in 4K from the original negative with new and archival special features, including interviews with D’Amato, Soavi, Eastman, Cliver and Geretta; a trailer and the soundtrack by Carlo Maria Cordio.

You can get it from Severin.

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!

Also: Smarter people than me would call that in media res. I just call it in the middle of stuff.

We have five heroes here 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 and the man who said, “I got molested in the little boys room.”).

They have to save a monastery, but they just sit and watch as more people get attacked, like a priest who 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 like they care even less — or are less 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 or those high school people from Facebook who have the back the blue flag as their icon. Except that Catch Dog hasn’t forgotten anything.

His 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. Never mind.

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 choices: “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, his 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. Even the end of the world is never the end.

“Flaming Cloud Devil” Ku Han-hun (Alex Man Chi-leung) has learned the Buddha’s Palm from his master and is challenged by four masters of the Evil Fire God power: “Unpredictable Dashing Ring” Sun Pi-ling (Shaw Yin-yin), “Heavenly Foot” Wai Chein Tien-chun, “Nine Roped Rings” Lui Piao-piao and “Thunderbolt Devil” Pi Li Shen-chun. He’s left for dead and twenty years later, his hiding place is found by Long Jian-fei (Tung Shing Yee), a cocky young fighter who has just been saved by Dameng, a giant flying bearded dragon. Having been trapped in a cave for two decades, Ku Han-hun is a bit insane, but he tells Long that he will teach him his secret art if he gets him the egg of a Golden Dragon. Our hero goes one further and also brings him a dagger that could just be a lightsaber. Pretty good for a guy who starts the movie thrown off a cliff by the new boyfriend of his former girlfriend.

Along the way, Long rescues sword sisters Chu Yu-hua (Yu An-an) and Chu Yu-chan (Hui Ying-hung), angering their master Sun- Pi-ling, who imprisons him. Wai Chein has also gone on to create an army including an acid spitting dwarf.

Based on Palm of a Thousand Buddhas, this is a shot in studio film that has — at times — simple special effects, such as an obvious costume for the dragon. But you know, who cares? It also has neon colors and near psychedelic flourishes as the martial arts skills go beyond punches and kicks and become energy radiating from the hands of the fighters, turning them into superheroes battling caves filled with monsters, looking for mysterious object after object. How can you not love a movie that announces its ripped-off Star Wars weapon with the sound of Vader’s labored breath?

Lieh Lo is awesome in this, a goofball hero who is smarter than he appears and who announces himself every time he shows up, saying “Bi Gu of East Island is here!” Have you ever seen a movie where a magic McGuffin heals the acne of an angry female martial arts master before? Nope. You never will again.

This was Taylor Wong’s second movie but man, he already had some magic.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume Three box set has a brand new 2K restoration of Buddha’s Palm as well as commentary by critic and translator Dylan Cheung, an alternate English title sequence for Buddha’s Palm as Raiders of the Magic Palm and a trailer.

You can get this set from MVD.

This may not be the type of movie that will thrill an audience with jump scares or play well at a Halloween party. It is, however, a movie that has some frightening moments within it and images that have stayed with me longer than the latest elevated horror movie that I have been promised will keep me awake at night and dominate my thoughts. That never happens with those movies. It has with Litan.

This is a movie that depends on what you see more than what the film tells you. In that you will be the judge if what you see is in the minds of the characters, if the magic is real, and if these moments are happening. Even the title takes a bit of thought, as a litany is a form of prayer, usually spoken by a priest, in which the celebrant makes spoken petitions to a higher being and the followers answer with a fixed response. If you’ve been to a Catholic Church, there are six approved litanies, and most are answered with “Lord have mercy on us.”

Your enjoyment of this film will also depend on your willingness to accept things like faith and that there could be something beyond all this, even if some of the characters directly state that they have no belief. This film is at once a fantastique – the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative – and a juxtaposition of that concept.

But, hey – let’s stop using college words and talk about the movie.

Nora (Marie-José Nat) has a premonition that shocks her out of her ordinary life and sends her into the streets of Litan, a village amid a Festival of the Dead. Yet, this isn’t a co-opted Pagan rite-turned-commercial. Things just feel off. Way off. As she seeks her husband, Jock  (director and writer Jean-Pierre Mocky), she encounters people dressed as clowns and animals, all as silver masked men who look like Fantomas by way of Destro keep on playing music.

Luo Yihu (Hwang Jang-Lee), the master of the Northern Legs Clan, has killed the master — Mr. Zhang (Yen Shi-Kwan) — of two young students — He Jiayu (Wong Yu) and Wu Dezhi (Chiang Kam) before letting them know that they’re next. They’re also idiots who would rather argue and prank one another than get better at fighter, so this will not be easy.

Directed by Hsu Hsia, Kid from Kwangtung, this takes its time to get to that fight, as it spends so much of the running time having He Jiayu and Wu Dezhi dress like roosters and a centipede to do costumed battle. You also get incense as a weapon, hopping vampires, an appearance of some of the synth effects from Flash Gordon, lots of blood and more silliness than ultra serious Shaw Brothers lovers may want. As for me, I had a blast, as this movie jumps from scene to scene and is devoted to entertaining you and making you laugh. What else can you ask for?

South Korean martial artist Hwang Jang-Lee was only in two Shaw Brothers movies, this film and Ghosts Galore. He’s also in Drunken Master, Snuff Bottle Connection, Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave, Millionaire’s Express and many more. He was scheduled to direct a film for Shaw Brothers but disagreements with actor Wong Yu led to him ending his contract.

The 88 Films limited edition blu ray of this movie has a slipcase with new artwork by Sam Gilbey, lobby cards, a trailer, an image gallery and a reversible sleeve with the original artwork.

You can order it from MVD.

Princess (Season Hubley, who was Nikki in Hardcore) is walking the streets to make money for her daughter Lisa losing her job. Sunset Boulevard is dangerous, as you know if you’ve watched the same movies that I have, but never more dangerous when pimp Ramrod (Wings Hauser) is running things.

LAPD vice squad sergeant Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) brings Princess down to the morgue to look at the body of her dead friend Ginger (Nina Blackwood, former MTV VJ) and tell her that she’ll be busted for cocaine and lose her daughter if she doesn’t help. Yeah, every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.

Even when she helps the cops catch Ramrod, he easily escapes, starting a reign of terror on the Sunset Strip looking for Princess, promising that she will be killed. He even castrates her former pimp, Sugar Pimp Dorsey (Fred “Rerun” Berry losing his dick? No!), and beating men and women alike into the great beyond all as he gets closer and closer. At the same time, Princess is turning tricks in fancy mansions, getting into coffins with old men who like to pretend that they are dead. That’s because she knows that the vice squad will never be able to change what happens on the streets.

I would not deserve this site and you reading it if I didn’t mention that one of the working girls is Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith.

Gary Sherman should get more credit than he does. I’ve never seen a boring movie from him. Wings Hauser is also an absolute maniac beyond all other lunatics in this and even sang “Neon Slime,” the song that plays at the end.

Supposedly, Martin Scorsese got in a fight with Dawn Steele over this movie, saying that it deserved to be the best movie of the year.

The opening says, “The motion picture you are about to see has been produced with the cooperation of law enforcement authorities. Though a work of fiction, it is a composite of events that have actually taken place on the streets of Hollywood.” That’s true. Producers Brian Frankish and James Robert Dyer approached Sandy Howard about making a realit documentary about prostitution with interviews from pimps, sex workers and the LAPD Vice Squad. The project eventually became a movie with Howard, Kenneth Peter and Robert Vincent O’Neil working on the story.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink.

Neon Slime

• 1.5 oz. Midori
• .5 oz. Southern Comfort
• .5 oz. sweet and sour mix (or .25 oz. lemon juice and .25 oz. simple syrup)
• .25 oz. egg whites
• 1 oz. lemon lime soda

1. Put all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake it up.
2. Let it sit for a moment, then shake it again. Pour over ice and enjoy.