Even being prepared for this movie by others who’ve seen it, I was not ready for the sheer onslaught that the last five minutes of this movie makes you endure. There’s brutal and then there’s this, a film that literally had me jumping around the room worried as to who would survive the final moments.

Adele is a female lawyer who believes that everyone deserves mercy. Unfortunately, several criminals steal her car, take her keys and rob her country home. Circumstances have led her and her husband there at the same time and he’s shot and killed. Three of the four get away and despite the tragedy, Adele attempts to stay true to her values. Her mother-in-law continually reminds her that she’s lost a son and that Adele’s son and daughter now have no father.

The thugs who remain on the streets keep calling and taunting her, telling her to lie so that they can all escape justice. But when the one left on the inside is seen as a snitch and killed, they decide to get their revenge on her, leading to a scene so horrifying that I worry that my words won’t do it justice. Seriously, this movie goes beyond Last House on the Left with old women brutalized, children punched in the fact and excessive use of fire. I was so sure that the daughter would be burned alive that I nearly watched this scene from the other room.

Directed by Jorge Grau (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, Blood Ceremony), this is a movie packed with fear and menace from the very start of the movie. Something bad seems like it’s going to happen, something bad does happen and something bad has to happen to those who deserve it. Grau really takes you on a journey in this one.

You can buy this Mondo Macabro release from Diabolik DVD.

John G. Avildsen had an interesting career. There are movies like Rocky and three Karate Kid films, along with Save the Tiger, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Lean on Me, Neighbors and this 1983 kind sorta coming of age film.

Rick Malone (Christopher Atkins) is one of the more popular students at his college and used to getting away with just about everything. However, when he makes a joke of his speech professor Faye Hanlon’s (Lesley Ann Warren) final, she fails him and forces him to take the class again.

Faye and her husband Whitney are going through a rough patch after he gets laid off, so when her sister suggests that they go to a strip club, she jumps at the opportunity. There, she watches Ricky the Rocket perform and realizes that he’s her student. Of course, she’s soon going to be cattle-prodding the oyster ditch with the lap rocket, as they say, with Ricky so that he can get his grades up.

Of course, this is going to end with Faye’s husband shooting at Ricky on a boat dock while demanding that he strip. So, there’s that.

The movie itself may not be much, but the soundtrack has all sorts of great stuff on it, like Jan Hammer composing much of the music, along with Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” and “Obsession” by Holly Knight and Michael Des Barres. That song would be covered a year later by Animotion and become a much bigger song.

Deney Terrio, the man who taught Travolta to dance in Saturday Night Fever, the man who hosted Dance Fever, the man who sued Merv Griffith for sexual harassment, the man who sued Hasbro for making a Littlest Pet Shop gecko disco character named Vinnie Terrio is also the man who appears in this film.

Also, for those who care about these kinds of things — you know who you are — Atkins has no underwear on for his love scenes.

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.”

As a kid, David Cronenberg used to pick up American television from across the border and worried that he’d see something he wasn’t supposed to see. Videodrome’s CIVIC-TV was based on the Canadian television network Citytv, which had a show called The Baby Blue Movie that played stuff like Camille 2000 and Wild Honey. There’s also an urban legend that Cronenberg saw Emanuelle In America and wondered how anyone could enjoy a movie that combined sexuality with snuff footage. I don’t know — or care — if that story is true. I’d like to just have complete faith in it.

The director was between Scanners and The Dead Zone and got a bigger budget on this movie than he never had before. Of course, it barely made its money back yet became a classic film, which is usually the way of the world.

Max Renn (James Woods) is the president of CIVIC-TV, a Toronto UHF television station that shows footage on the absolute limit of what is allowed to be shown on TV. One of the satellite dish operators shows Max Videodrome, which is either coming from Malaysia or Pittsburgh — as a lifelong resident, I am pretty pleased with that — that shows people being tortured and murdered with no storyline to get in the way.

Max’s lover, Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry) is so turned on by Videodrome that she goes to try out and never returns. Max is now obsessed and learns that the channel is so much more than just a video show. It may also be the voice of a political movement.

Media theorist Brian O’Blivion is the only person who can guide Max further down the tunnel. At the homeless shelter where O’Blivion’s daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits, The Pit) conducts marathon TV watching experiments. He soon learns that O’Blivion was killed by his partners who created Videodrome but lives on in the hours of video footage he created. Oh yeah — Videodrome also creates brain tumors and hallucinations which are both the symptom and the cause.

Videodrome is really part of an ideological war between its sex and violence-obsessed viewers and Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson, Black Christmas) and the Spectacular Optical Corporation, a combination ophthalmology and arms company. They program Max — via videotapes inserted into a vaginal opening in his chest that causes his body to transform and even grow a gun in his hand — to murder anyone that gets in their way, which may or may not all be hallucinations, until Bianca reprograms him to start killing for her father’s cause, shouting “Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.”

That new flesh means ascending outside of the bonds of our normal form, which for Max means suicide. Or does it? There were plenty of endings made for this movie, including one where Max, Bianca and Nicki appear on the set of Videodrome, all with slits in their chests filled with sex organs. As an atheist, Cronenberg cut this ending, as he felt it may make people think he believed in Heaven. He was also forced to cut all manner of berserk things from the script, like Max having a grenade for a hand, as well as him melting into Nicki as they kissed and a total of five more characters dying of cancer.

This sequence sums up why I love this movie so much:

Max Renn: Why do it for real? It’s easier and safer to fake it.

Masha: Because it has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous.

You can hear dialogue from this movie in tons of songs, including “Microphone Test” by Meat Beat Manifesto, “Master Hit” by Front 242, “Children” by EMF, “Draining Faces” by Skinny Puppy, “Scared to Live” by Psychic TV and so many more.

For a movie made in 1983, it really could have been made today. There’s so much to experience here and I will be going back for another experience. See you in Pittsburgh.

Directed and produced by Charles Band, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn feels like the movie that goes with all of my favorite stoner metal albums. It’s also in 3D, which makes it even better and it was already a movie in which the bad guys spray people with green drugs that put them into a dream state where they’re killed with crystals.

Dogen (Jeffrey Byron, who co-wrote The Dungeonmaster) is a space ranger searching for the supernatural evil that is Jared-Syn, the leader of the One Eyes who have torn out their own eye and started a holy crusade against the humans that have come to their planet. Except that Syn is probably not really one of them and just wants to destroy everyone.

Our hero rescues Dhyana, a crystal miner’s daughter played by Kelly Preston, and together they meet a prospector named Rhodes (Tim Thomerson), who takes him to the nomads. This leads to a battle with one of them, Hurok (Richard Moll, whose shaved head for this movie led to the producers of Night Court loving that look) that ends with them as friends.

I kind of love that this movie combines a western, a post-apocalyptic movie, science fiction, sorcery and whatever else it feels like throwing at the screen. I just wish that I had seen it in 3D as a kid, because I really feel like my life would be in a very different place today as a result.

The world needs more movies that make as little sense and are as entertaining as this.

Editor’s Note: This review ran on October 17, 2019. We’re bringing it back for our “Hikmet ‘Howard’ Avedis Week” of reviews.

Hikmet (or Howard) Avedis studied at the University of Southern California and won the George Cukor Award, which totally prepared him for a lifetime of working in exploitation fare. With titles like The Stepmother, The Teacher (consider it the grindhouse version of The Graduate), The Specialist (where Adam West fights against the water company), the Connie Stevens’ classic Scorchy and the utterly baffling sex comedy/giallo They’re Playing With Fire, Avedis may not have made Oscar-worthy pictures, but he certainly knew how to entertain. He also wrote this movie along with his wife Marlene Schmidt, who also acted in this movie (as she did in nearly every movie he made).

Known internationally as Embalmed and Hall of Death, this film has shown up on a few of the top ten slasher lists that we’re putting together for later this month. It’s a great example of what happens when a slasher strays from the form somewhat and you get the idea that this movie is kind of like a carny haunted house, ready to scare you at every turn.

Wealthy psychiatrist Dr. Parson has died and only his daughter Christie (Mary Elizabeth McDonough, Erin Walton from The Waltons and one of the stars of the abysmal Funland) believes that there was foul play. The official word is that he drowned and that’s good enough for her mother Eve (Lynda Day George!), who doesn’t believe the dream her daughter had where dad was bludgeoned with a baseball bat. Oh yeah — she also sleepwalks all the time.

But let’s forget about all that. Let’s get to the mortuary, where Christie’s boyfriend Greg Stevens (David Wallace, who was also in Humongous) is stealing tires with his friend Josh. After all, if Hank Andrews (Christopher George, never far from his wife, in one of his last roles) isn’t going to pay Josh fairly, they may as well take what they want.

While they’re in the midst of this larceny, an occult ritual just happens to happen, with Hank leading a bevy of gorgeous women in what is called a seance. Josh is unfazed, as he claims that this kind of thing happens all the time. He goes off to get the tires and gets stabbed for his efforts. Greg can only watch as someone drives off in his van.

Greg and Christie search everywhere for Josh, including the local roller skating rink because it’s 1983. There’s some insanely great roller skating footage here, if you like that kind of thing. You know that I do.

As Christie drives to her family’s mansion the next day, a car starts to follow her. Soon after her arrival, a hooded figure begins to follow her around the pool where her father died. Her mother claims its all a dream.

The next day, Greg tells Christie that her mother was one of the women in the ritual he watched. That makes sense to her, because now Eve and Hank are shacking up and her dad’s corpse is barely cold. If things couldn’t get weirder for our heroes, Paul (Bill Paxton, who shows up in so many great films of this era), the son of Hank, begins getting hot and bothered for his soon-to-be stepsister. He’s even weirder than his dad, but that’s probably because his mom killed herself.

Greg and Christie try to hook up, but her entire house goes wild, with lights flashing on and off, music playing by itself and even the film seeming to stop and start. It’s a great sequence and really sets up the gaslighting — or supernatural attacks — that Christie is forced to endure.

Greg and Christie decide to follow her mother, who heads right to the mortuary. Stranger and stranger? It gets even more so, as a cloaked figure who looks like Paul attacks Christie that night and in a shot that looks similar to Suspiria, almost pulls her out of a glass window.

While Eve again says it was all a dream, she does have one oddball theory: Paul used to be a patient of her dead husband and he was obsessed with Christie, talking about her the entire time. This is soon followed by Paul, clad in a latex mask, appearing and stabbing Eve in her bed. He attacks Christie and brings her to the mortuary, claiming that he intends to embalm her alive.

Hank arrives to stop him and we get the villain moment where he explains his actions: he had to punish everyone, like Eve for telling Christie he was insane and Dr. Parson for putting him in jail. He then goes one step beyond by stabbing his father just in time for Greg to try to save her. A battle leads to Greg getting locked in the embalming chamber while Paul arranges all the bodies of his victims for a wedding ceremony.

You know how weddings go — you spend much of the the time conducting a symphony. Paul does exactly that while we see all of his victims, including his mother who was in a coma and not dead. What follows is a battle between Paul and his scalpel and Greg with an axe, ending with Christie sleepwalking her way into killing the villain with one hack of the axe into his back. Our heroes embrace, just in time for Paul’s mom to awaken from her coma and attack them with a knife, probably because she saw the end of Carrie and knew this needed one more jump scare.

We’ve talked about Gary Graver and his work for Orson Welles, in the adult film industry and within films like Texas Lightning, Sorceress and Trick or Treats, amongst other films. His cinematography makes this movie a cut above ordinary slasher fare.

You can get this from Ronin Flix. It’s also available on You Tube.

Shirley Muldowney is the First Lady of Drag Racing and the first woman to receive a license from the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) to drive a Top Fuel dragster. After getting over that obstacle, she won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980 and 1982, becoming the first person to win two and three Top Fuel titles. She’s ranked 21st on ESPN’s list of the Top 25 Drivers of All Time and fifth on the National Hot Rod Association’s 50th-Anniversary list of its Top 50 Drivers. A member of the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and Automotive Hall of Fame, she also had a song written about her by L7 and is one of the many women brought up by Le Tigre in the song “Hot Topic.”

Back in 1956, Shirley Roque (Bedelia) married auto mechanic Jack Muldowney (Leo Rossi), despite her father Tex (Hoyt Axton) wanting her to rely on herself. By the time she’s ready to race a decade later, with her husband as her mechanic, she has to get three signatures from other racers to even be considered.

She does, starting with “Big Daddy” Don Garlits (Bill McKinney) and Connie Kalitta (Beau Bridges), who has already fallen for her. The film is just about their relationship as it is the races, but it’s still worth a watch.

Director Johnathan Kaplan mainly works in TV these days, but he had success with this film and The Accused. He also directed the Reform School Girl remake and Bad Girls, a female centric western. Before those films, he made some greats for Roger Corman, like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers before directing Truck Turner, White Line Fever and Mr. Billion, a bomb that tried to introduced Terrence Hill to American audiences.

Image courtesy of Vectezzy.

Also known as Blade Violent, Emmanuelle in Prison and Emmanuelle Escapes from Hell, this movie was shot at the same time as Violence In a Women’s Prison and let me tell you, it’s a race as to which one of the two is more sordid.

Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is sent to a violent women’s prison — just like in Violence In a Women’s Prison* — and before you know it, she’s battling for top dog status with Albina (Ursula Flores, who was Consuelo in Mattei’s other aforementioned prison epic), which leads to Albina getting knifed in the leg, her arm broken and her wig torn clean off. But soon, four male prisoners — Victor “Geronimo” Brain (Raul Cabrera, Nero and Poppea – An Orgy of Power), Helmut “Blade” von Bauer (Pierangelo Pozzato, Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals), Brett O’Hara (Robert Mura, Seven Magnificent Gladiators) and their leader “Crazy Boy” Henderson (Gabriele Tinti) — break in to the prison and start assaulting and killing everyone in sight.

From there on out, the movie is an endless attack on the senses, with SWAT troopers invading the prison and killing one of the convicts, a riff on the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter and one of the girls inserting a vagina in a very private place before a man enters her. Plus, you get Lorraine de Selle from House on the Edge of the Park as the warden and guards screaming things like “I’d like to bite your nipples off…and I’ll do it!”

By the end of the movie, “Crazy Boy” uses Emanuelle and a sheriff as human shields in a desperate attempt to escape. This is the kind of movie where no one may make it out alive.

But seriously, the beginning of this movie — where Emanuelle and fellow prisoners Laura (Maria Romano, The Final Executioner) and Irene (Antonella Giacomini, Seven Magnificent Gladiators) have a stage play in prison where they paint their faces and speak on emasculating men, being loose women and how only love can save them that’s interrupted by Albina throwing tomatoes in Emanuelle’s face — is like something straight out of John Waters.

According to IMDB, Laura Gemser has stated unequivocally that Claudio Fragasso actually directed this movie. She also strangely stays clothed, which is a bold choice for a movie that has razor blades slicing schlongs in half.

*In that movie, she was investigating the prison on behalf of Amnesty International. This one, she’s had drugs planted on her by a high-ranking politician. I bet she caught him and his wife loading the clown in the cannon while watching a snuff tape.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally talked about this Bruno Mattei film back on February 1, 2019. Let’s bring it back and celebrate the barbarian films of Mattei!

What happens when Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragrasso ripoff — remake — The Magnificent Seven/The Seven Samurai with gladiators and barbarians instead of cowboys and, well, samurai? This was originally going to be Hercules, according to Variety, but Luigi Cozzi took over that one and supposedly was brought in to save this one.

The plot here — again, it’s the same movie as the other two films that gather seven heroes — is about Nicerote (Dan Vadis, a former member of the Mae West Muscle Review who played Hercules in Hercules the Invincible, Roccia in The Ten Gladiators movies and appeared in several Clint Eastwood movies), a bandit leader and his sorceress mother who makes yearly raids on a peasant village. But this year, Pandora (Carla Ferrigno, who was Athena in Hercules and also in Black Roses) and the women of the village have found a magic sword and go off to hire a hero who can use it and anyone else who can finally end the annual destruction of their homes.

Now, the mighty barbarian Han (Lou Ferrigno) wields the mystical Sword of Achilles and soon assembles a team of gladiators to help him win the day. There’s Scipio (Brad Harris, who played Goliath, Hercules and Samson in past peblum films, as well as Durango and Sabata), Julia (Sybil Danning, the real draw of this film, playing the Harry Luck Magnificent Seven character), Goliath (Emilio Messina, Lepto from The Ten Gladiators), Festo (Giovanni Cianfriglia, who played Superargo in two movies) and more.

However, you may wonder how a movie with Lou Ferrigno throwing rocks at people and Sybil Danning being, well, Sybil Danning, is so boring. It’s an amazing feat. I’ve tried to watch this twice and both times barely made it. It’s a great idea with poor execution, sadly.

You can get this from Revok.

Twelve years ago, a married couple purchased an antique vase that possessed the wife, which led to her death from demonic-driven homicide after some cloven-hoofed arrdvarkery and also her husband throwing himself out a window after he also turned into a goopy faced demon.

Now, that very same demon has fulfilled its curse and come back to possess their nephew.

This isn’t the kind of possession film that you’ve come to expect here in America. This is Hong Kong Category III sleaze where people tear their own faces off to expose maggots, where family dogs are eaten intestines first, cakes are filled with worms, real eagles get killed proving that Italy does not have a copyright on real animal violence in films which is usually my tipping point and then, a monk shoots lasers.

It also has a character named Uncle Fuk.

There is, however, no devil fetus.