Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today, we’re going to talk about a movie that concerns World War 2 and a secret part of that war that nobody talks about: aliens.

In Italy, an American military patrol discovers a crashed spaceship and its alien crew. It also finds itself up against a Nazi flank packed with soldiers and tanks. Also: Hitler gets punched in the face.

Written by Paul De Meo (Eliminators) and directed by Danny Bilson (who also wrote The Rocketeer), this is a film long on humor and crazy ideas but short on plot. If you like Trancers, well, you’ll like this as it shares a lot of the same actors. Tim Thomerson is great as the near-mythic Sarge, a man who never dies no matter how many times he’s shot. If you’ve ever read Sergeant Rock, he’ll seem pretty familiar.

If Empire Pictures was around today, they’d be talking about a shared universe where characters from ReAnimator would battle Jack Deth from Trancers and The Dungeonmaster. Oh man — don’t forget RoboJox, Dolls, The Eliminators and Klaus Kinski from Crawlspace!

If you’re sick of launching off bottle rockets today, by all means, sit down and watch this. You can find it at Amazon Prime.

I have no idea how to explain this movie to you. There are moments that are pure ridiculousness. There are scenes filled with amateur hour acting and effects. And then there’s an ending that is powerful and shocking. It’s really a rough one to figure out. I loved it — but it’s another in a long line of movies that I don’t recommend to anyone but the people I know who will get it.

The old VHS box explains it like this: “A group of college students on holiday become prey for a killer and his two sadistic and demented sons. One son, an unlicensed doctor, is mentally unhinged by destructive brain parasites. The other son, a shy and lonely psychopath, falls in love with a dead girl. While the insane boys are blundering through their destructive rampage, the father stalks the night with random violence. Though he is shot, beaten, and run over by a car, the maniac cannot be defeated.

One by one the students enter the horror house, where they must face the malignant forces left behind by unnatural scientific experimentations. They are hunted down, tortured and eliminated until only one girl is left to fight for her life against the trio of murderers.

Directed by the notorious rock video maker, Richard Casey, Horror House on Highway 5 is filled with strange humor and wild action.”

We go from a typical slasher murder right to a classroom, where he assigns three of his students to go to Littletown and investigate Bartholomew, a dead Nazi rocket scientist and make model rockets.

The most studious of the kids, Louise, goes to interview Dr. Mabuser, who is the one with bugs in his head. His brother (or partner) Gary falls in love with her, but they still use an iron to sear her breast in some Nazi black magic rite. While that’s going on, Sally and Mike go to the quarry to smoke weed and make model rockets. And then there’s the whole matter of the guy in the Richard Nixon mask who can’t be killed (and who is listed as Ronald Reagan in the credits).

Obviously, no one paid for the music used in this film, as it has everything from “Rumble” by Link Wray to acid rock to violins to surf rock like The Safaris to The Dictators and The Count Five playing “Psychotic Reaction.”

And then the ending! Seriously, the last two minutes of this film, where one of the victims thinks that she has escaped, feels like the movie that Rob Zombie has always wanted to make.

Director Richard Casey was behind several music videos for bands like Blue Oyster Cult, whose songs are said to have coded messages relating to The Process Church. In 2014, he directed a spiritual sequel, Horror House on Highway 6, which is about the following: “A college student is injured by a malfunctioning soda machine on Highway 6. His fellow students take him to a doctor who lives in a basement bomb shelter and awaits the second coming of Elvis Presley. They can’t leave, and a killer stalks them with an ax.”

You can check this out for yourself on Amazon Prime or order the Vinegar Syndrome lovingly restored blu-ray. They claim that it’s one of the most confusing and compelling homemade horror films ever made. They’re right. You can also grab it at Diabolik DVD, but stock is limited!

“They say he came from the north, like the ice wins that sweep the prairies during the great winter. Tex Willer. From the furthest reaches of the Silver Mountains to the birth of the Blue River of the long canoes, his name was spoken with respect. Death rode at his side, ready to strike anyone. who dared violate the law of white man. But his spirit soared free. It knew no boundaries. And it came to pass that even the Indian tribes learned to respect him. And they gave him the name Night Eagle. Then came the day when he joined his blood with the blood of the Navajos. And after a few moons, his forehead bore the symbol of leadership, the sacred wampum. History soon becomes entwined with legend, in the lost time between magic and reality. Let me tell you his story, then. And of the adventurous days which made him immortal.”

After an introduction like that, how can I not get excited about this movie? It’s based on the Italian comic book Tex by Sergio Bonelli, who also created Mister No and owned the comic house that published the adventures of Dylan Dog (which inspired the movies Dylan Dog and Cemetery Man).

Plans for a Tex movie had been in the works since the 1960’s, with the original goal of having Charlton Heston play Tex and Jack Palance in the role of Kit. Duccio Tessari finally directed the film, which was a pilot for a proposed Tex TV series. He’d c0-written A Fistful of Dollars with Sergio Leone and directed the Ringo series of spaghetti westerns, so he seemed like a good choice, at least from the Western aspect of Tex. Yet if you see the poster art, this movie also focuses on the fantastic aspects of the character, drawing on three stories — El Morisco, Sierra Encantada and Il signore dell’abisso.

Giuliano Gemma plays Tex. He was known for his Western films, like Day of Anger and for playing Ringo in that aforementioned series of movies. William Berger (The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff, Five Dolls for an August Moon) is Kit.

They’re the on the trail of some convoy robbers who are using a secret Indian weapon that mummifies people. It turns out that a secret tribe are ready to go to war with the white man, so our heroes must stop them. Look for Bonelli as an Indian mystic in an uncredited role.

Fans of the Tex comic hated the movie, as they felt that Gemma was completely unbelievable as Tex, even to the point that he wore the wrong color shirt. According to this review, “when the film was finally shown in Venice, most people in the audience were fans of the comics, who had only bought a ticket to boo the film.”

This is a movie that has fantastic elements, sets itself up to be a bonkers genre-defying mashup and just doesn’t seem to go far enough. This would have to be quite the movie to surpass that poster art, though!

Want to see this for yourself? Revok has the DVD for a good price or you can check it out on Amazon Prime.

It’s the same story we told about The Shadow. After Burton’s Batman, Hollywood wanted tentpole movies that could make sequel after sequel. So why not turn to men’s paperbacks, like The Destroyer, a series of 152 books written by the team of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (as well as some ghostwriters) that have 30 million books in print?

Sam Makin (Fred Ward, The Right Stuff) was a tough New York City cop who died in the line of duty before being resurrected as Remo Williams, now the CURE organization’s front man in the war against the enemies of the United States. Now with a new face, no fingerprints and training in the assassination skill known as Sinanju from the Korean martial artist Chiun (Joel Grey, who is not Asian and is actually a Jewish man from Cleveland), Remo is ready to battle corrupt weapons dealers and save Kate Mulgrew’s military officer character.

I’ve been begging Becca to watch this movie for years and she responded to it by asking, “Was this a real movie or one of those ones you like that no one knew about?” It was an actual movie. Maybe people didn’t care as much as me, because in 1985 I was fully into The Destroyer thanks to Marvel publishing a black and white comic book version.

Watching this film years later, it’s weird how little happens. “Are they ever going to do anything or is this the entire movie?” my wife asked. “This is his origin story,” I tried to say, but she’s right. For all the amazing things Remo learns to do, he gets to do very little of them.

But hey — Wilford Brimley is great as Remo’s boss, Harold Smith. And Michael Pataki is always a welcome face in a film. There’s enough to like in this one, like cameos by Reginald VelJohnson (Die Hard) and William Hickey (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).

This was intended to be a blue-collar James Bond. Which makes sense, once you realize that they used Bond screenwriter Christopher Wood (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker) and Bond director Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun).

Sadly, there was a 1988 TV spinoff of the movie that never made it past the pilot stage, starring Jeffrey Meek as Remo and Roddy McDowall as Chiun (who was British and also not Asian).

The original DVD of this film is out of print, so you’ll probably pay $10-15 for a used copy. Arrow Video did release it awhile back, but not in a U.S. friendly format. There’s a limited edition at Diabolik DVD that you can hurry up and get, too. You can also find it on the VUDU streaming service for around $3.

I fear sounding like a broken record, but Larry Cohen’s films contain themes that stay timeless, regardless of when they were released. Take The Stuff for example — consumerism, corporate greed, celebrity culture, junk food — none of the theme in this film have gone away. If anything, they’ve only increased in importance.

The Stuff — a yogurt-like white dessert — is discovered coming out of the ground like black gold to Jed Clampett. It’s sweet and addictive and quickly gets sold like ice cream. It’s all natural with no calories and incredibly filling, so it helps people lose weight. Of course, sales go through the roof and destroy the ice cream industry. Along with junk food mogul Charles W. “Chocolate Chip Charley” Hobbs, these purveyors of sugar hire David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, who also appears in Cohen’s Q) to get to the bottom of The Stuff and then destroy it.

The more he learns about the product, the more horrified he becomes. The Stuff is actually a parasite that takes over whoever eats it, taking over their brain and gradually transforming them into zombies as it consumes them from the inside out — the very inverse of how people consume products.

A young boy named Jason is learning the same lesson the hard way. It’s ruined his family, so he destroys a supermarket display.

David also meets Nicole, the ad exec who learns that the campaign that she created for The Stuff has only led to death and destruction. As someone who has worked in the ad industry for over twenty years, the battle between craft and commerce has never been so beautifully illustrated than it is here. The film is packed with fake commercials of celebrities hawking The Stuff, including Wendy’s pitchwoman Clara “Where’s the beef?” Peller, who yells, “Where’s The Stuff?” to Abe Vigoda.

Everyone that consumes The Stuff eventually turns into a gooey white substance and those under its grip do everything they can to kill our heroes (Nicole and David become lovers; they rescue Jason just as the police arrest him). The corporation that makes The Stuff claims they are trying to rid the world of hunger, but the possibly extraterrestrial substances is really being created to take over the world.

They work together with retired United States Army Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears (a perfectly cast Paul Sorvino, Goodfellas) to destroy the zombies and a lake of The Stuff before sending a civil defense message to the country — the only way to destroy The Stuff is to burn it with fire.

David then visits the leader of The Stuff Company, Mr. Fletcher, who reveals that they haven’t destroyed all of the ways they can get the product. Now, they’re working with the ice cream industry –including Mr. Vickers, who originally hired David — to make The Taste, a product that is 88% ice cream and 12% The Stuff. They believe that it will be much safer and still as addictive. However, David brings in Jason and the two force the CEOs to eat The Stuff at gunpoint. David asks, “Are you eating it or is it eating you?” as the cops arrive to arrest the corporate con men.

You know how you should never leave the credits during a Marvel movie? Cohen was again ahead of his time here, as the final crawl also has moments showing smugglers selling The Stuff on the black market and a woman in a bathrobe saying, “Enough is never enough” while holding a container of The Stuff.

From its inventive gore and special effects to its wry social commentary, The Stuff is sheer delight. It moves fast, it’s packed with action and it has plenty to make you laugh, too.  It may make you avoid ice cream for awhile, too.

You can watch The Stuff on Shudder (it’s also available with commentary by Joe Bob Briggs) or you can grab the Arrow reissue at Diabolik DVD.

Douglas Hickox directed one of my favorite films, Vincent Price’s Theater of Blood. And he also directed this — a TV movie turned video store favorite thanks to its striking box art.

Joe Steiner (Richard Widmark, whose portrayal of Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death would inspire Eric Binford in 1980’s Fade to Black) is a cop who can’t let go. A brutal slayer of an entire family on a child’s birthday has scarred him and he promises the dead family that he won’t rest until he brings their killer to justice.

Allen Devlin (Keith Carradine, Nashville) is a man without an identity. He was in a car crash that destroyed both his face and memory. He wakes up with a scarred visage that upsets nearly everyone that sees it except for his nurse, Chris Graham (Kathleen Quinlan, Airport ’77).

Mike Patterson (Michael Back, Swan from The Warriors) is another cop who was Chris’ boyfriend and lost her to Allen. He can’t let go.

All three men are trapped by the past: Steiner believes that Allen is the family killer. Mike wants Chris back at nearly any cost. And Allen might be a new person, born on the day of his car crash, but he may also be that killer. Even he isn’t so sure.

So how is this a giallo? It doesn’t have the expected psychosexual and fashionista elements, nor the camerawork showing the killer’s POV. However, it does feature plenty of identity confusion and a main character who may or may not be the villain.

Come to think of it, this film has a strange narrative in that there is no real hero of the piece, with all three men and Chris serving as characters within the story framework instead of a sole protagonist for us to root for.

For a TV movie, this gets pretty dark, with some uncomfortable male on female violence at the end. There’s also a great steadicam sequence where Chris opens door after door to try and find either her children or the killer, with the smooth movement of the camera slowly increasing her worry and making the scene quite claustrophobic.

Originally airing on July 28, 1995 on HBO, Blackout gained even more notoriety as it inspired Ed Sherman’s murder of his wife Ellen in August of that year. Sherman also used an air conditioner to slow the decomposition of his wife’s dead body in an attempt to establish his alibi.

Blackout has never been commercially released on DVD, but you can find it at the VHSPS, a great source for all films that have been forgotten.

After the father-and-son production team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind finished up with Superman III and Supergirl, what else was left but to explain the mysteries of Santa Claus to children all over the world?

Who should direct should an endeavor? How about John Carpenter? No, really. However, the auteur wanted to have a hand in the writing, musical score and final cut of the movie. Plus, he wanted to cast Brian Dennehy as Santa.

Other directors included multiple James Bond series director Lewis Gilbert, The Sound of Music director Robert Wise and again, another James Bond series director (and the man in the chair for Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins ), Guy Hamilton.

Finally, Supergirl director Jeannot Szwarc was selected. He’d also directed Jaws 2 and Somewhere in Time. He had a great relationship with the Salkinds and TriStar Pictures.

The result? A movie that got horrible reviews and made half of its budget back.

But hey — sometimes bombs are great. So let’s get into it.

Back in the past, Santa (David Huddleston, The Big Lewbowski himself) is a woodcarver who takes his wife Anya (Judy Cornwell, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?) and reindeer, Donner and Blitzen, into the snow to deliver gifts to children. One night, though, the snow is too much and they all die. The end.

The movie would be pretty depressing if this is where it all ended. Instead, they are transported to the ice mountains at the top of the world, some Shangri-La type place where Dr. Strange and Iron Fist got his powers. They meet a whole bunch of elves, including Dooley (one of the blind men in 1972’s Tales from the Crypt), the inventor elf Patch (Dudley Moore, Arthur) and Puffy (Sean Combs). Our hero learns that his destiny is to deliver gifts every Christmas Eve, along with an entire team of reindeer. Finally, as the holiday approaches, the Ancient One (Burgess Meredith, The Devil’s Rain!)  — I told you this was Dr. Strange — renames our hero as Santa Claus.

PS — Anthony O’Donnell really played Puffy.

Fast forward to modern times and Santa is exhausted. His wife suggests he get an assistant and a competition between Patch and Puffy ends with Patch winning, but his modern machine makes work that isn’t up to Santa’s standards.

Santa meets some kids — a New York City orphan named Joe and a rich girl named Cornelia — and Patch quits his job and starts working for B.Z. (John Lithgow, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension), an unsafe toymaker that Congress is trying to shut down. Patch takes reindeer feed and makes lollipops that allow children to fly, allowing B.Z. to create a new holiday on March 25 — Christmas 2. This all makes Santa pretty sad, as Patch is becoming the new face of Christmas. Or Christmas 2. Look, I don’t know.

The newest toy for Christmas 2 will be candy canes that allow kids to fly (why a different product shape is needed is never really discussed), but when they are exposed to heat, they explode. B.Z. and Towzer (Jeffrey Kramer, Graham from Halloween II), his head of R&D, decide to let Patch take the fall. Joe and Cornelia get involved, Patch tells them he never wanted to take over for Santa and they all take the Patchmobile to the North Pole.

The reindeer — despite Comet and Cupid having the flu and who knows why this is even a plot point — help save Patch and everyone has a dance party because of Return of the Jedi. Santa and Mrs. Claus adopt Joe and Cordelia, keeping them away from the rest of the world and certainly adding the kids to some kind of Code Adam list, Meanwhile, B.Z. has eaten too many candy canes and flies into space, where one assumes he dies in the cold vacuum of space. Santa does not care, laughing heartily as he has crushed Patch’s spirit for good and kidnapped two human children to do his bidding. Or maybe it’s a happy ending.

For a movie that’s all about the magic and meaning of Christmas, the product placement for McDonald’s, Coke and Pabst Blue Ribbon — this is a kid-centric film — is problematic.

Marvel even did a tie-in comic, which at least has Frank Springer art.

These are the kind of movies I hated as a kid — message films that told me how to feel, act and behave. This is why Godzilla and King Kong are my idea of holiday films — beasts condemned by the world who only want to destroy the works of man! Feliz navidad!

Silver Bullet may be based on King’s Cycle of the Werewolf, but there are so many deviations and changes from the story, one could say that they’re both stories about a werewolf in a small town and get away with it. It’s probably best to experience both of them, as they cover some of the same story but differ in so many ways. Perhaps you can pretend that it’s the werewolf version of Rashomon.

Tarker’s Mill, Maine. 1976. The Coslaw family is a mess, to be perfectly honest. Jane wants to get away. Marty (Corey Ham, The Lost Boys) fights with her and is dealing with being a paraplegic. And the parents, Nan and Bob, are always at odds.

Things change once murder tears apart their town, starting with a railroad worker (James Gammon, the coach from Major League). Then, a depressed pregnant woman and Milt Sturmfuller are both killed and people start to worry. Once Billy Kinkaid is killed flying his kite (PS never fly a kite in a Stephen King story, witness Pet Semetary), the townspeople lose their minds.

Despite Sheriff Joe Haller (Terry O’Quinn, The Stepfather!) and Reverend Lester Lowe (Big Ed Hurley from Twin Peaks) trying to calm everyone down, a mob goes into the woods to stop the killer. That said — the tables get turned and many of them die, including Owen the bartender (Laurence Tierney, a noted real-life maniac who was in Reservoir Dogs and Film Threat’s filmed version of the Tube Bar Red tapes).

That Reverend isn’t on the level though, as he dreams of a mass funeral where everyone turns into a wolf. He wakes up and begs God to stop the pain.

The town may cancel the fireworks, but when Uncle Red (also another real-life manic, Gary Busey) visits, he gives Marty a wheelchair/motorcycle he calls the “Silver Bullet” that can shoot rockets. The werewolf almost kills him later that evening, but he blasts it in the left eye. He soon realizes that the werewolf and the Reverend are the same person, so he begins mailing him anonymous notes saying that he should kill himself.

The priest learns that Marty wrote the letters and he repeatedly tries to kill the kid. Even after convincing Sheriff Haller, the cop gets killed by Lowe.

Out of options, Red helps Marty make a silver bullet to kill the werewolf with (we all need a completely crazy uncle in our lives, right?) and sends the parents away on a trip. Of course, the werewolf attacks them, tossing Red like a ragdoll and nearly killing Jane before Marty blows it away, revealing the form of the Reverend.

The film didn’t even have a werewolf suit before shooting began, which led to plenty of battles between King and producer Dino De Laurentiis, who had already caused original director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm) to quit. The replacement, Daniel Attias, has gone on to direct much of today’s top television — The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under and Homeland.

Busey did his own stunts — you can see him get launched really hard in one scene. He also ad libbed most of his own dialogue, which makes me stand by my belief that people just tell him that he isn’t in a movie and that everything around him is real. That’s how you capture pure Busey. To wit — he claims that “his reaction to the werewolf breaking through the wall was genuine as there was no rehearsal of that scene and it was completed in a single take.”

You can do worse than Silver Bullet. I mean, you can do better, too. But when it comes to Stephen King films, it’s a pulpy, gory film that’s fun pretty much the whole way through. The scene with the churchgoers turning into werewolves has seventy werewolves it it, so it’s pretty awesome.

BONUS! You can hear the podcast we did about this movie, too!

UPDATE: This is streaming on Shudder.

Cat’s Eye takes three Stephen King stories, “Quitters, Inc.”, “The Ledge” (both from Night Shift) and “General,” an original story. The three tales are connected by a cat, who is involved in the first two stories but becomes the main character in the final part of the film.

That cat starts as a stray who is chased by Cujo and is nearly run over by Christine (this film is literally Stephen King fan service, also featuring references to The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary). He hears the voice of a little girl asking for help, but he’s captured by an employee of Quitters, Inc.

That’s the title of the first story, an exploration of “What if the Mob helped people quit smoking?” James Woods and Alan King star here and the rules for quitting cigarettes are simple. The first time you get caught, you get shocked. The second time, your wife gets shocked. The third time, your Downs Syndrome daughter (Drew Barrymore, in one of three roles) gets shocked. Oh yeah and they rape your wife. Finally, they just give up on you.

“The Ledge” follows Cressner (Kenneth McMillan, Baron Harkonnen from Dune) catching Johnny Norris (Robert Hays from Airplane!) and his wife in an affair. Cressner is a better man, so he challenges Johnny to walk around a building.

“General” pretty much saves the film, the tale of Amanda (Barrymore) and an evil gnome who tries to take her soul. General is the cat we’ve been following for the entire film and he’s trying to save her, but her mother thinks the cat just wants to kill her bird. This part of the film is quite literally a Loony Toons movie brought to life, with the grotesque troll matching wits with our heroic cat (Frank Welker does the voices for both).

This film is part of the Dino De Laurentiis era of King movies, with the producer asking King to write a role for Barrymore, who he loved in Firestarter. It’s a throwaway movie, to be honest, with some fun effects at the end. It’s directed by Lewis Teague, who also was in the chair for The Jewel of the Nile, Cujo, Navy Seals, the Dukes of Hazzard TV reunion and the aborted Justice League of America TV movie.

It was also the very first episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here!