Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Unsung Horrors Rule (under 1000 logged views on Letterboxd)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

After watching this film, I feel like I need to take a bath in Diane Lane’s open-air bathtub, but for much different reasons than her stalker did.

The year 2025 will go down for many things, some good, some bad, but as far as my Letterboxd stats go, it will be the year I discovered Karen Arthur.

The Mafu Cage, a twisted tale of two sisters starring Lee Grant and Carol Kane, completely blew my mind. Director Karen Arthur really knows how to ratchet up the claustrophobia, leading to some anxiety-inducing scenes. She also knows how to make the small feel big. The Mafu Cage was adapted from a stage play, but Arthur is able to downplay any restrictions found in a play. After watching The Mafu Cage, I had to seek out her debut film, Legacy, an adaptation of a one-woman show depicting a woman’s descent into madness. Talk about unsung, it only has 45 logged views on Letterboxd. 

After these first two films, Arthur became primarily a television director, which had a stigma about it in the 1970s and 80s. If you couldn’t cut it as a film film director, you were shuffled over to television, the perceived inferior media. If television was seen as less than, it surely did not stop her from producing the highest of quality. The Rape of Richard Beck turns the tables on the traditional rape-revenge film, with Richard Crenna earning an Emmy award along the way for his portrayal of a cop who does not play by the rules (or, actually, literally plays by his own set of rules), but finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Speaking of the Emmys, Arthur became the first female to win a Best Director award for an episode of Cagney and Lacey. While television work fills most of her resume, Arthur did have one other feature film in her, the erotic thriller Lady Beware.

Released about a month before the mother of all erotic thrillers, Fatal Attraction, Lady Beware tells the story of Katya (Lane), an ambitious young woman who does not take no for an answer, nearly demanding a place as the window dresser for a Pittsburgh department store. Katya’s displays prove to be controversial and provocative, but one person whose attention she receives is Jack, a married X-ray technician who begins an unhealthy obsession with Katya, quickly escalating from obscene phone calls to breaking and entering.

Unfortunately, the finished project did not get the approval of Arthur herself. The producers attempted to amp up the exploitative side of the film, including nude scenes of Lane that Arthur says she would not have included. She stated that she considered removing her name from the film (would that have made it a film by Alice Smithee?), but would not because the actors cannot remove their names.

Still, despite being a bit of a mess (side characters are introduced, only to be abandoned, no doubt most of their performance ending up on the cutting room floor), Lady Beware is a very interesting watch. It could have been the performance that elevated Lane from child star to adult actress. She would have to wait almost 15 years for Unfaithful to bring her the attention she deserved all along. 

Lady Beware is currently stuck on VHS, desperately needing restoration from one of these boutique physical media labels. Paging Cinematographe! I think this film would fit perfectly in that collection.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Lina Romay

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

I really do not have the expertise to write anything about a Jess Franco film. It’s not going to stop me though. 

Faceless is only the sixth Franco film I’ve watched. And the ones I have watched may not be the ones that spring to mind. Venus in Furs and Bloody Moon seem to be popular (at least according to Letterboxd). My favorite film of his has been The Other Side of the Mirror. And then I’ve watched some really random ones: Night of the Skull and Bahia Blanca. So I do not have a great handle on Franco’s filmography.

I have seen Eyes Without A Face. And I’m not the only one apparently. Faceless owes a lot to Georges Franju’s classic tale of a doctor trying to successfully graft another person’s face onto the face of his daughter. I’ve never really tried to make a ranking of my favorite horror films of all time, but if I did, this one would surely be high on the list.

Apparently, Jess Franco uses this motif a good bit in his films about Dr. Orloff (played by Howard Vernon). Again, I’m really at a disadvantage because I just have not watched these films. But I really want to. And after watching Faceless, I feel a great need to prioritize these Franco films.

In Faceless, we are treated to Helmut Berger as a plastic surgeon who has made an enemy in a former patient who blames him for a botched procedure. When this patient tries to throw acid on his face, he ducks and unfortunately his sister receives the burn. So one does what one has to—get his assistant (Brigette Lahaie, an actress whose films I should also prioritize) to start kidnapping models, and contact the infamous Dr. Orloff to perform face transplants. Unfortunately for them, one of the models they kidnap is the daughter of Teddy Savalas (criminally underused here). He hires Christopher Mitchum (of all people) to go to Paris and find his daughter.

Faceless has pretty much everything I look for in a horror movie this time of year. A stellar cast. An interesting enough plot to keep my interest. Some over the top gore. I really cannot ask for much more.

This selection feels a bit like a cheat since it was supposed to highlight Spanish actress Lina Romay, long time collaborator and eventually the wife of Jess Franco. In Faceless, she only appears in a cameo as Dr. Orloff’s wife. There were definitely plenty of other films to choose from. If nothing else, this day has been a good reminder that I really should focus on more Jess Franco in the new year. Maybe I will make a goal to have Franco be my most watched director of 2026. 

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Bleeding Skull!

About the Author: Parker Simpson is a writer and podcaster focusing on cult films and their social impacts. They currently cohost Where Is My Mind, a podcast focusing on underappreciated films from a variety of genres and countries. They have also held panels, chartered local organizations, and written articles to their blog. When not writing or studying, they like to spend time with their pets and go outside. Check out the podcast Linktree and blog.

Homemade horror films are a huge hit or miss of mine. Oftentimes, I’ll get frustrated with the boring visuals (both film and video), Z-grade acting, and disjointed pacing. Then I remember I couldn’t make anything half as charming, so I shut up and take some sleeping pills to further disjoint the experience. This is no different with The Soultangler, a late 80’s riff on the reemerging mad scientist genre. In it, Dr. Lupesky invents a drug that allows the souls of the users to transplant into corpses. Naturally, this comes with some very severe side effects, from mild hallucinations to downright madness. 

If you’re like me, you could see this as slightly… derivative of a well-known cult classic. The Soultangler initially seems like a rip-off of Stuart Gordon’s classic Re-Animator, taking a doctor’s fascination with life and death to the extremes while characters around him are extremely concerned about what he’s doing. In the latter, you see a clean-cut, no-nonsense Jeffrey Combs slyly manipulating everyone around him as he weasels his way out of every situation. Here, we see a grease-ridden, basement-dwelling hubris-ridden maniac who seems to be significantly more attracted to women yet hates them more than his counterpart. You might be able to see who I like more based on the wording. That being said, I would argue that watching Dr. Lupesky ramble about his work is a strong point of this film, and that he is dissimilar enough to disqualify his character as a mere clone of the indomitable Herbert West.

The film’s main flaw is the pacing. Most SOV/16mm horror films of this era slip into a time distortion, where 15 minutes feels like an hour or more. The Soultangler is no different; this thing drags its feet from the 5-minute mark until the final 15. It is a challenging watch on a small screen, with no one around you to comment on the small yet quirky aspects of everyday life that inevitably pervades all folks in its ilk. Additionally, the majority of the camera work and acting are all stiff as a rod. The saving grace that undercuts those criticisms is the weirdness that suddenly pops up at any given moment. Completely unsynced audio that made me restart a scene? Killer original music? Believable investigative reporting? C’mon, you can’t help but love it. The cherry on top is the goopy gore that is scattered throughout the film; the finale in particular is a lot of fun.

I didn’t hate this. I really wanted to love it, even. If anything, it proved to me that these sorts of films are an acquired taste, which is maybe something I don’t have at this moment. That’s ok; it doesn’t take away the fact that Pat Bishow made a relatively entertaining film with an extremely low budget, and that on its own is remarkable. 

Thanks to the folks at Bleeding Skull for dropping myself and many others a line to this (and many other unknown gems)!