This movie is so important to me. I feel like I’ve talked about it so much, but now that there’s finally a great version of it available, I can’t retire the $1 DVD I have of it that has BUTCH written across it in sharpie.

The director of A Dolphin’s Tale and A Dolphin’s Tale 2, Skippy from Family Ties and one of the stars of A Chorus Line made the most metal film ever. Let that sink in.

I grew up a fat, bespeckled child in a small town with crushing self esteem issues, a love for gore movies and a sarcastic mind that loved the way people treated me when I started dressing all in black. Every single situation that Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price, the previously mentioned Skippy) endures in this film…I lived it. If a monster Glenn Danzig (Verotika) could take over shop class and kill my tormentors, I would have gladly welcomed such mayhem and menace.

Eddie is a big fan of Sammi Curr, a superstar who went to the same high school Eddie is in, was tormented and bullied the same way Eddie is, became a big star and then died in a mysterious fire. Radio DJ Nuke (Gene “inventor of the devil horns*” Simmons, who played a great transgendered bad guy in Never Too Young to Die while wearing his girlfriend Cher’s clothes) gives Eddie the only vinyl copy of Sammi’s satanic masterwork “Songs in the Key of Death.”

Eddie does precisely what I’d do: he listens to the record and falls asleep. He has a crazy dream about the fire that killed Curr and awakens to the album playing backwards, telling him how to gain revenge on the bullies that torment him.

Eddie chickens out though — he doesn’t want to kill the jocks who have made his life so rough. Sammi takes matters into his own hands, creating an electric surge that allows him to escape the record and return to our reality. Eddie responds by smashing his stereo. Sammi’s response is as fucking perfect as it gets: “No false metal.”

Sammi’s friend Roger gets involved and unwittingly plays a cassette — fucking metal — at the school dance, causing Sammi to leap out of a guitar amp and take the stage. The crowd goes wild before Sammi starts killing audience members, shooting lightning at them and revealing his burned face. Holy shit — I saw this scene at the drive-in this year and the exuberance of hearing Fastaway blasting from car stereos in the fog at 5 AM is an experience I recommend to every single person reading this.

Can Eddie stop Sammi from being played on the radio and attacking everyone that hears it? Of course. It’s an ’80s horror movie. But man — I’m all from more Sammi Curr (sadly, Tony Fields died of AIDS in 1995).

Oh I forgot – Ozzy is a preacher in this that Sammi attacks. It’s a small cameo, just like Gene Simmons’ role, but that doesn’t stop my DVD cover from claiming they starred in this.

If you’re an 80s metal fan (and if not, man, thanks for reading this far), there are so many band logos and posters to spot in this, from the expected like Anthrax and KISS to the out of left field like Raven, Exciter and Savatage. You’ll also be much more likely to not dismiss this film as a piece of shit.

Me? I quote from this film almost every day. “The bait is you. Let the big fish hook themselves. You’re the bait. The bait is you.”

I really hope that people rediscover this movie or discover it in the first place. It’s probably the most perfect of all heavy metal horror movies, which wasn’t hard to do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredible.

*Dio has always claimed that he got the gesture from his Italian grandmother, who claimed it warded off the evil eye.

This movie’s Synapse 4K UHD has a 1080p Blu-ray of a 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative approved by Director of Photography Robert Elswit, along with audio commentary with director Charles Martin Smith, moderated by filmmaker Mark Savage. There are also interviews with writer/producer Michael S. Murphey and writer Rhet Topham, moderated by film historian Michael Felsher; an audio conversation with Paul Corupe and Allison Lang, authors of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s; a making-of featurette; a tribute to Tony Fields; Horror’s Hallowed Grounds: The Filming Locations of Trick or Treat with Sean Clark; the Fastaway video for “After Midnight;” trailers, TV commercials and radio ads; a still gallery with an interview with photographer Phillip V. Caruso; a vintage electronic press kit; a limited edition slipcover and reversible cover art. You can get this from MVD.

Nobody — well, me — is looking for this movie, but when you’re trying to watch every Jess Franco movie, you hunt down so many films, and then you get to them and wonder, what have you really learned? Is, as Lemmy taught me, the chase better than the catch? This film has no story, just coupling after coupling in

The cast includes Lina Romay (you knew that), Antonio Mayans (probably figured that) and Mabel Escaño. It all takes place in the beds of a hospital, which was simple to film as it could be any room. The hospital dirty movie makes so much sense, as it’s a place close to death and where we often turn to what keeps us alive when confronted by the void.

According to the I’m In a Jess Franco State of Mind site, “problems with producer Emilio Larraga (Golden Films) ruined many projects such as El Rinoceronte Blanco, Teleporno…” and this movie. That, along with the movie Franco produced, iBiba La Banda!, and losses on Phollastia and Phalo Crest, caused Jess to make Dark Mission with Daniel Lesoeur.

Fly Story, as this is called, is one of the hardest Jess movies to find. I got this cover art from Trash Palace, which has it, but there’s not much info on it. But somehow, I found it, I watched it, and it is one of the many movies that brings me closer to watching every one of his films, which is, as they say, the only way to know Franco and appreciate him. From here on, the pickings become slim, and the hunt starts for movies that may not exist.

If you see me on the corner with a handwritten sign looking like an addict, it’s because I can’t find that copy of Blind Target and have resorted to sex work to get even a VHS of it. Please help.

Already made by Jess Franco as Elles font tout in 1979 and El Hotel de los Ligues in 1983, Para las Nenas, leche calentita (Warm cream… for the babes) is like a commedia sexy all’Italiana except because Jess and Lina Romay is involved, we see the sex.

On the Spanish coast, we have three couples looking for something. For Lulu (Lina Romay) and Apollo (Antonio Mayans), it’s a good time, even if he can’t perform because his sister is with them everywhere they go. A lesbian couple is being watched by Pepito and several of his friends. And then there’s Jean and Rossy (Mari Carmen G. Alonso), who can’t stop getting it on.

That’s it. 67 minutes of sex action in the Hotel Venus. Probably made in the hotel where Jess and crew were making something else because, in 1986, he made 12 more movies using names like Clifford Brown for his own adult and Lulu Laverne and Candy Coster for the film he made with Lina.

In these three movies, people who have issues with sex resolve them through sex. How often did Jess feel he had to make something until it was right? Was it ever right? What was he trying to accomplish by going back again? Just adding insertions? Or was there a more significant message at work here?

After a shipwreck, two Spanish sisters (Helen Garret and Flavia Mayans) and their teacher, Miss Muro (Lina Romay), find themselves alone on an island. Or they thought they were, as an old man was also there, living in a cave filled with the gold of the many ships that had wrecked into this place.

Based on 1945’s Los últimos de Filipinas, Jess Franco iso making his Blue Lagoon, except there’s a chimpanzee, and the girls’ clothes get stolen pretty early on. That means while this feels as close as Franco ever gets to a Disney TV adventure movie, it also has nudity from characters who are supposed to be in their early teens.

There’s also a talking parrot and Franco’s voice, as usual.

What a strange and fascinating movie, one that makes us consider what if Franco had never learned how to zoom into vaginas and instead madelow-stakess family adventure films that also have young girls becoming women and falling in love with fishermen, while the old man in the cave becomes the teacher’s husband and they swear their vows on a book by Kant. His movies fascinate me because they just can’t be expected; even if you give Jess a creative brief, you’ll get precisely whatever he wants to make, along with an opening that’s stock footage and fog.

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.

Zack (Tom Waits) and Jack (John Lurie) have been set up and landed in jail, where they’re doing time alongside Bob (Roberto Benigni) an Italian tourist who barely understands English and is in jail for accidental manslaughter. Zack and Jack want to fight almost immediately, but when Bob is able to break out — the movie is more about these men than how they jailbreak, the mechanics aren’t important — they stay with the foreigner because he can always find food.

Waits calls this “a Russian neo-fugitive episode of The Honeymooners.” Jarmusch listened to Waits’ songs and based a lot of the film on how they made him feel, yet Lurie and his band The Lounge Lizards recorded the soundtrack.

Bob, as an innocent, is able to take these broken and fighting men to the promised land, where he stays with Nicoletta (Nicoletta Braschi, who would later marry Benigni). As for Zack and Jack, they go their separate ways.

I love that this movie’s most heartfelt line, “It’s a sad and beautiful world,” was misspoken by Benigni.

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.

Directed and written by Richard Lowenstein, this is the story of the band Dogs In Space, who are part of the Melbourne’s “Little Band” post-punk music scene in 1978. Two of its members, Sam (Michael Hutchence) and Tim (Nique Needles), live in a group home with Anna (Saskia Post), Luchio (Tony Helou) and The Girl (Deanna Bond).

The script — it’s episodic and rambling, basically about live music, partying and screwing around — was based on Lowenstein’s personal experiences of living in a similar house. He’d directed videos for INXS and wrote Sam’s role for Hutchence. That role is based on Sam Sejavka from the band The Ears, who lived with Lowenstein. He didn’t agree with a lot of this movie, saying “Even though it’s an interesting time that should be documented, I find it hard to believe Richard could do this to his friends. It’s just Richard’s version of what happened. It’s not the correct version.”

Tim is the stand-in for Lowenstein and as for Sejavka, he is in this in a party scene, playing someone named Michael, which is some nice inversion.

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.

James Shelby Downard once said, “Never allow anyone the luxury of assuming that because the dead and deadening scenery of the American city-of-dreadful-night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat-footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of “baseball-hot dogs-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet” that it is somehow outside the psycho-sexual domain. The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these “modern” conditions precisely because sorcery is not what 20th century man can accept as real.”

I’d like to think that Downard saw this movie, shook his head a bit and thought, “Well, they got some of it right.”

The Church of Satan film list says of Blue Velvet, “This neo-noir film by David Lynch is meant to be felt and experienced more than understood, Blue Velvet is about the hidden and unknown. It’s both terrifying and erotic simultaneously. The innocent outlook on life is stripped away to stark reality where predator and prey intermingle. 

The Satanic qualities presented are the exploration of the darker side of Human Nature, Lust, Fetishism, the Dominant and the Submissive, the Law of the Forbidden, Self Preservation, and Justice.”

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) has come home to Lumberton, North Carolina — a town that has a radio station with the call letters WOOD and seems so normal that something has to be wrong — a place named after lumber on the Lumber River. He’s home because his father has had a seizure and on the way home from the hospital, Jeffrey finds a severed ear. He does what any normal boy would do: he takes it to a cop, Detective John Williams (George Dickerson). This allows him to meet the perfect girl next door, the man’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). She might always have the perfect boyfriend, football player Mike Shaw (Ken Stovitz), but Jeffrey is able to get into Sandy’s world by being dangerous and investigating someone connected to that ear: lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini, who would appear in the perhaps just as strange Tough Guys Don’t Dance after this). He sneaks into her apartment appearing to be an exterminator, except she catches him and easily overpowers him thanks to her feminine power. As she’s on the verge of assaulting him, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) arrives, sending Jeffrey into a closet and Dorothy to the floor as Frank alternatively cries, screams, huffs gas and beats her into a submissive sexual state.

Yeah, this isn’t working out like Jeffrey planned.

Jeffrey still sees things like either a child or a character in a detective novel, giving people names like the well-dressed man or the Yellow Man. He becomes obsessed with Dorothy while still courting Sandy. He thinks he can save Dorothy’s husband and son Don and Don, but once he gives in to Dorothy’s pleas to hit her while they lie in bed, he’s lost. He’s in over his head. His fantasies that he’d write to True Detective — instead of Penthouse Forum — are consuming. Deadly, too. This isn’t some kind of jerk off dream that barely comes true. This is violent and bloody fucking that winds up with you trapped in a car with maniacs like Booth, visiting suave lounge singers like Ben (Dean Stockwell) and wondering if everyone in the world is against you and probably being right. It’s the kind of fantasy that gets you kissed all over by a lunatic and waking up almost dead in a field far from home.

Normal humanity didn’t react well to this movie. For example, the agency representing Rossellini immediately dropped her as a client after the test screenings and the nuns at the school that she went to in Rome called to say they were praying for her.

Hopper wasn’t cast originally, as Frank was written for Michael Ironside. The Last Movie director called Lynch and screamed, “I’ve got to play Frank! I am Frank!” Lynch also wanted Frank to inhale helium, but Hopper wanted it to be amyl nitrate. Lynch said that Hopper told him, “David, I know what’s in these different canisters.” And I said, “Thank God, Dennis, that you know that!” And he named all the gases!”

In Satan Speaks, Anton LaVey wrote about songs like “Telstar” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” as Satanic songs.

“The word ‘occult’ simply means hidden or secret,” he says. “Go to the record store, to the corner where no one else is, where everything is dusty and nobody ever goes. Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” is mystical music, dramatic, Gothic, satanically programmed music. But it’s not occult music. “Yes, We Have No Bananas” would be an occult tune.

It’s occult because when you put that record on the turntable, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that there is not another person in the entire world who is listening to that record at that time. If there’s anything, any frequency, any power that exists anywhere in this cosmos, in this universe, you’re gonna stand out like a beacon! It truly makes you elite.”

Lynch understands that by using Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” — he almost used “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil, a song that was first played on the last episode of The Monkees by its writer Tom Buckley — in Blue Velvet. Orbison has always seemed like an alien to me, perhaps because of his look, his voice or because he voided the verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus structure. His songs feel like being in, well, a dream.

Frank finds great magic in the words “candy-colored clown” and it feels like Ben is about to break down when he sings “In dreams, you’re mine all of the time. We’re together in dreams, in dreams.” A lot of Roy Orbison made me feel like that when I was a child, like future nostalgia, the same feeling that made me listen to breakup songs over and over crying before I had ever had my heart broken, as if I were saving up for a time when I would finally be unrequited.