Upon watching this again for the first time in probably thirty years, I was struck by how European the movie feels. Perhaps it’s the color tones throughout, suggesting the patina of Italian horror cinema (both Fulci and Craven cite surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel as an influence). It could also be John Saxon having lead billing. Or just that it doesn’t feel like any horror cinema that was currently being made in the United States.

The real villain of this piece is not Freddy Krueger — more on him in a bit — but the parents of Elm Street who have allowed secrets and their assumed authority over their children to do unspeakable and unspoken things. All of them are haunted by it, divorced, depressed and self-medicating with over-dedication to their jobs or their addictions.

There are stories that David Warner was originally going to play Freddy, but that’s been disproven. After plenty of actors tried out and failed to win the part, it went to Robert Englund, who darkened his eyes and acted like Klaus Kinski (!) to get the part.

The other feeling I have about this movie is that it owes a major debt — as all horror movies post 1978 do –to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Much like that film, the true horror happens within the foliage of the suburbs, with shadow people showing up and disappearing. Much of the action on the final night happens within two houses. One of the main characters has the ultimate authority figure, a policeman, for a father. And the cinematography by Jacques Haitkin glides near the characters and around them, much like the Steadicam shots that start Carpenter’s film.

The film starts with Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss, who puts the events of Better Off Dead into motion by breaking up with Lloyd Dobler) waking up from a nightmare where a disfigured man chases her with a bladed glove. I loved the way this scene looks, as you could almost consider Freddy off-brand here, as his arms grow comedically long and he moves way faster than he would in the rest of the series. Yet by keeping him in the shadows, he’s absolutely terrifying.

When Tina awakens, her nightgown has been slashed and she’s afraid to go to sleep again. She learns that her friends, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, who left Stamford University to be in this), Glen (introducing Johnny Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nicki Corri) have all been having the same dream. To console Tina, they all stay at her parent’s house overnight. But when Tina falls asleep, Krueger is waiting. Rod awakes to find Tina flying all over the room and up the walls — an astounding effects sequence in the pre-CGI era — and he flees the scene after her death.

Soon, Rod is arrested by Lieutenant Don Thompson (Saxon), Nancy’s father. Freddy now starts pursuing her, chasing her as she falls asleep in class (look for Lin Shaye as the teacher) and later in the bathtub, as his claw raises like a demented and deadly phallus between her thighs. Rod tells her how Tina dies and now she knows that the same killer is definitely after her (Garcia’s watery eyes and lack of focus made Langenkamp think he was acting his heart out; the truth is he was high on heroin for real in this scene). She tries to find the killer, with Glen watching over her, but he’s a lout and easily falls asleep. Only the alarm clock saves her, but no one can save Rod, who is hung in his sleep while rotting in a jail cell.

Nancy’s mom Marge (Ronee Blakley, who was married to Wim Wenders, sang backup on Dylan’s song “Hurricane” and is also in Altman’s Nashville) takes her to a sleep clinic, where Dr. King (Charles Fleischer, Roger Rabbit’s voice) tries to figure out her nightmares. She emerges from a dream holding Freddy’s hat to her mother’s horror. Soon, she reveals to her daughter that the parents of Elm Street got revenge on Freddy Krueger, a child murderer after a judge let him go on a technicality. In a deleted scene, we also learn that Nancy and her friends all lost a brother or sister that they never knew about.

While Nancy is barred up in her house by new security measures, Glen’s parents won’t allow him to see her. Soon, he’s asleep and is transformed into an overwhelming fountain of blood. Nancy falls asleep after asking her father to come in twenty minutes. He doesn’t listen and she pulls Freddy into our world. On the run, she screams for help until her father finally comes to her aid, just in time to watch a burning Freddy kill his ex-wife and them both disappear.

This is an incredibly complex stunt where Freddy is set ablaze, chases Nancy up the stairs, falls back down and runs back up — all in one take! At the time, it was the most elaborate fire stunt ever filmed and won Anthony Cecere an award for the best stunt of the year.

Nancy then realizes that if she doesn’t believe in Freddy, he can’t hurt her. She wakes up and every single one of her friends is still alive, ready to go to school. As the convertible hood opens up in the colors of the killer’s sweater, she realizes that she’s still trapped by Freddy, who drags her mother through a window.

In Craven’s original script, the movie simply ended on a happy note. Producer Robert Shaye wanted the twist ending so that the door was open for a sequel, something Craven had no interest in. Four different endings were filmed: Craven’s happy ending, Shaye’s ending where Freddy wins and two compromises between their ideas.

I watched A Nightmare On Elm Street at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ator 2: The Blade Master was on the CBS Late Movie on August 5, 1986 and April 12, 1985.

Joe D’Amato wanted to make a prehistoric movie like Quest for Fire called Adamo ed Eva that read a lot like 1983’s Adam and Eve vs. The Cannibals. However, once he called in Miles O’Keefe to be in the movie, the actor said that he couldn’t be in the film due to moral and religious reasons. One wonders why he was able to work with Joe D’Amato, a guy who made some of the scummiest films around.

Born Aristide Massaccesi, this man of many names had his paws in everything from being a camera operator on Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World to cinematography on What Have You Done to Solange? before directing his own films like Death Smiles on a Murderer, Beyond the Darkness, Antropophagus, 2020 Texas Gladiators, Endgame and so many more. He also worked with porn stars like Rocco Siffredi on Tarzan X – Shame of Jane before being an early innovator of porn-based parodies/cover versions of other works of art, such as Shakespeare porn (Othello 2000), mythology (Hercules – A Sex Adventure), famous icons (Scarface, Amadeus ) and, of course, plenty of looks into the deviance of the Roman empire.

This time around, Aristide Massaccesi is known as David Hills, for those keeping score.

Akronos has found the Geometric Nucleus and is keeping its secret safe when Zor (Ariel from Jubilee) and his men attack the castle. The old king begs his daughter Mila (Lisa Foster, who starred in the Cinemax classic Fanny Hill and later became a special effects artist and video game developer) to find his student Ator (O’Keefe).

Mila gets shot with an arrow pretty much right away, but Ator knows how to use palm leaves and dry ice to heal any wound, a scene which nearly made me fall of my couch in fits of giggles. Soon, she joins Ator and Thong as they battle their way back to the castle, dealing with cannibals and snake gods.

Somehow, Ator also knows how to make a modern hang glider and bombs, which he uses to destroy Zor’s army. After they battle, Ator even wants Zor to live, because he’s a progressive barbarian hero, but the bad guy tries to kill him. Luckily, Thong takes him out.

After all that, Akronos gives the Geometric Nucleus to Ator, who also pulls that old chestnut out that his life is too dangerous to share with her. He takes the Nucleus to a distant land and sets off a nuke.

Yes, I just wrote that. Because I just watched that.

If you want to see this with riffing, it’s called The Cave Dwellers in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 form. But man, a movie like this doesn’t really even need people talking over it. It was shot with no script in order to compete with Conan the Destroyer. How awesome is that?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Newspaper photographer Jeff Rhodes (Thom Meyers) has found that the people of a small Texas town are all drained of all of their blood. He’s on a deadline — Uncle Joe (Robert Bradeen) and Aunt Kate (Billie Keller) demand that he quit his job and come back to the family farm — while his brother Ralph (played by director and writer Roger Coburn) is a successful scientist at Research City. He also knows that alien life forms have come to Earth to bring dead bodies back to life and seek blood. If Jeff can stop the bedroom rodeo with Julie (Laura Ellis) he just might save the world if General Sanders (Dennis Letts) doesn’t nuke everyone first.

Bloodsuckers from Outer Space is aware that it’s a bad movie and leans into it, yet in the scenes where the aliens describe being dead and how Jeff will soon join them, the dialogue is actually pretty incredible. If only it went that way and became a Texas-based Messiah of Evil.

After running for President every year between 1968 and 1996, Pat Paulsen gets to be the leader of the United States in this movie and like almost everyone else, he’s busier having sex than doing something.

This had its first showing at Joe Bob Briggs’ 3rd Annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Custom Car Rally in 1984 — Paulsen was chaffed by how bad it looked — and even came out on VHS by a major company, Karl-Lorimar Home Video.

Coburn was also one of the directors of Tabloid.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi and get the blu ray from MVD. You can also read an interview with the director here.

“Moonchild, hear the mandrake scream
Moonchild, open the seventh seal
Moonchild, you’ll be mine soon child
Moonchild, take my hand tonight!”

Yeah, any movie inspired by Iron Maiden — it says so right in the credits — deserves all of your money.

Directed and written by Todd Sheets, Moonchild is a movie that realizes that the best post-apoclyptic movies didn’t need huge budgets, just sets that looked like the end of the world, some wildness to set them apart and all the heart you can muster. More 2019: After the Fall of New York, less Children of Men.

Also, you can sum up this movie in three more words: Werewolves are awesome.

Jacob Stryker (Auggi Alvarez) is a man who has had his genes spliced with those of a wolf and is therefore one of those awesome werewolves. He’s lost his son Caleb after he escaped the government ghouls who operated on him. And oh yeah, he has a bomb ready to blow his guts up in 72 hours, which is taking Snake Plissken cosplay taken as far as you can take it.

He’s being tracked by cannibals, bounty hunters, a ninja, a cyborg grandmother and an entire army with only a small group of rebels like Talon and Athena helping him. But you know, Stryker doesn’t need anybody. He’s a werewolf in the time after the fall of man.

This movie doesn’t have any budget, but there are still car chases and people throwing themselves out of moving vehicles which is at once awesome and wreckless and you know, I’ll go with awesome. More people should be willing to face death for the joy of post-apocalyptic cinema.

Directed by Johnny Mak Tong-hung, this is the first of four movies in this series.

Nobody is heroic in this, as Tung (Wai Lam), Chubby (Wong Kin), Chung (Lung Chiang), Blockhead (Fong Li), Bullseye (Lam Seung-Sam) and Rooster (Chan Ging) leave China for Hong Kong and pull off a jewel heist. When they get there, they run into numerous issues and need to make money while waiting for the right moment to strike. That means they end up killing someone and it ends up being a cop, a crime that gets them double crossed by the man who paid for it, Tai (Wai Shum).

The end of this film is incredible, a doomed pursuit as the police chase the gang down by any means necessary. Even though we’ve seen all of the criminals be horrible people, we start to feel for them because there’s no way they’re going to get out alive.

88 Films has released this film and Long Arm of the Law Part II in a box set. It comes with new artwork by Sean Longmore, stunning new 2K restorations of both films, commentary on both films by Frank Djeng and interviews with Phillip Can and Michael Mak. You can get it from MVD.

If there’s a hicksploitation hall of fame, Shelley Winters should probably be in it. She’s in one of the movies that defines so many of the genre’s themes, The Night of the Hunter, as well as some of its best — and most exploitative examples — films, such as Bloody Mama and Poor Pretty Eddie. She also plays a housekeeper Katy who has also had a space baby sometime in the past in the astounding 70s blast of odd called The Visitor.

Somewhere in the Deep South, this is all about barefoot farmer’s daughter Ellie (Sheila Kennedy, Penthouse Pet of the Month for December 1981 and the 1983 Pet of the Year) getting revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of her stepmother (Winters) — who killed the kindly old man while she chowed down on fried chicken.

She only has one weapon. Her body. And she knows how to use it.

George Gobel, Edward Albert and Pat Paulsen all show up, but the main thrill of the film is its rampant nudity. Somehow, this movie is also a version of the Greek myth of Elektra, if you can wrap your mind around that.

Director Peter Wittman was also behind exactly one other movie, Play Dead, where a woman kills with her brain and her dog. It’s not great or even good, but it’s the kind of movie that you stayed up to watch on a Friday night on Cinemax. If you never did that, you’re probably going to hate this. If you did, you have a near-limitless capacity for enduring boring films. Not that I would know or anything.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Alley Cat has three directors. I have no idea why, but Victor M. Ordonez (who is in Nine Deaths of the Ninja and Hellhole), Ed Palmos and Al Valetta (who is in Sole Survivor, Runaway Nightmare and Hollywood’s New Blood) all had their hand in this movie, leaving Robert Waters, who also wrote Fighting Mad, to write the actual story.

Billie (Karin Mani, who was also in Avenging Angel) is our heroine Billie. She starts the movie by stopping some scumbags from stealing her car. They go their boss Scarface (Michael Wayne), who decides that he’s going to turn this tiger into an alley cat, a plan that starts by putting her grandmother in the hospital and beating her grandfather something fierce. The one good thing that happens is that she falls for a cop named Johnny (Robert Torti), who ends up having to arrest her with his partner Boyle (Jon Greene) when she defends some joggers from the very same criminals and has a gun without a permit.

When Billie goes to court, she pays twice the fine of the rapists, whose victims are intimidated by Scarface and never show. Billie reacts like a manaic, gets charged with contempt of court and turns her movie into a WIP film for a little, complete with requisite shower moment.

This is the only women’s revenge movie — yes, Billie gets out and gets said payback — in which the lead character eats at an Arby’s. The old Arby’s, before they had the meats and all they had was that giant beef hat on the sign. And oh yeah — while she’s in jail, her grandmother dies and Billie is robbed of those last moments, so even though her boyfriend wants to legally deal with Scarface, you will be hoping that she shoots him right in the dick.