What if they made a budget-friendly version of Hardcore that featured Barbara Crampton as Bonnie, a woman searching for her sister who has been lost in the Los Angeles world of cinema? And what if Dr. Pepper Werewolf David Naughton played tough cop Vince McCarthy, the only man who can help her find her sister, Debbie (Kimberly Evenson, Inga from Porky’s Revenge) escape the clutches of maybe Hugh Hefner but named Victor Nardi (Elvis’ stunt double Lance LeGault), because it’s cool to make Italian stereotypical bad guys even in 2025. And what if Jimmie Walker played a porn store employee? And how about if Charles Napier was the angry cop boss?

This is that movie.

It’s the kind of movie where the cop and the girl sneak onto a porn set and almost have to act in it, with one of the bad guys asking to look at Vince’s cock, who unzips away from Bonnie and then the scumbag replies, “Holy Christ! What do you feed that monster?” Where everyone suddenly knows kung fu. And can we get a role for Robert Dryer, the evil Jake from Savage Streets, please?

Who would make something like this?

Howard Avedis, that’s who.

The man who gave us They’re Playing With Fire, Separate Ways, Mortuary, The Teacher, The Specialist, The Stepmother, Dr. Minx, Scorchy, The Fifth Floor and Texas Detour. A drive-in guy made good, who also realized exactly what Hardcore was missing.

A chimpanzee roommate for the cop.

The cop has a monkey that lives with him and that monkey straight up walks in on a nearly fully nude Barbara Crampton, who just laughs it off. Oh, what a cute little guy! When he just came in, eating a banana, I didn’t know what was happening. That’s the kind of movie this is.

A film that ends with a victim who should be far away from the bad guy somehow getting a gun and killing him in front of tons of cops, who had to have been rock hard watching her kill a man with no due process.

This is why I don’t get to have film series at local theaters: if I did, I would totally pick Kidnapped and stand before audiences, telling them the mystery of moviemaking and preparing them for it. But I couldn’t. In no way could I get them ready. Additionally, there would be no audience, because who, other than me, wants to watch this?

You can watch this on YouTube.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

Saturday, April 26 has Frankenhooker, Doom Asylum, Brain Damage and Basket Case 2.

After the much-criticized second installment (I actually really enjoyed it, as it has a lot of European flair and its subject matter seems like a middle finger in the face of teenage boys who would seem to be its biggest audience), Wes Craven returned to write the inspiration for this script, which was initially about the phenomenon of children traveling to a specific location to commit suicide (think Japanese murder forests).

Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell took that direction and convinced New Line that the series should go further into Freddy’s dream world. The success of this film proved that A Nightmare on Elm Street would be a franchise, as this film made more than the first two movies put together. The team would go on to create 1988’s remake of The Blob before Darabont went into making Stephen King adaptions and Russell would direct The Mask, The Scorpion King and Collateral.

Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) is obsessed with the abandoned house on Elm Street (which one assumes is the last house on the left), making papier-mâché sculptures (which makes for a tremendous compressed credit sequence, showing headlines of what has gone on before) and dreaming of Freddy chasing her. She awakens from her nightmare to discover that she’s slicing her own wrists as her mother Elaine (Brooke Bundy) has to interrupt her sleepover date to save her daughter’s life.

Kristen ends up in Westin Hospital, run by Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson, Body Double), battling the orderlies and doctors who want to sedate her. Check out a young Laurence Fishburne here as orderly Max Daniels! She’s eventually helped by the new therapist — Nancy Thompson! — who recites Freddy’s nursery rhyme to her. Continuity be damned, Nancy’s grey streak is now on the opposite side of her head.

We meet the rest of the patients, who will soon become the Dream Warriors: Phillip the sleepwalker (Bradley Gregg, Class of 1999), wheelchair-bound Will (Ira Heiden, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), streetwise Kincaid, actress Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow, After Midnight), the silent Joey and Taryn, a former drug addict (Jennifer Rubin, who is also in a movie that totally rips off this one, Bad Dreams).

The Dream Warriors is pure entertainment. Freddy moves toward being more of a joking character while transforming into a snake, a TV set, a gigantic puppet master and even turning his fingers into drug-filled hypodermic needles. Kristen can pull the rest of the teens into her dreams, which they’ll need as Freddy and all of their doctors are pretty much against them.

Dr. Neil learns from Sister Mart Helena the true origins of Freddy, the bastard son of one hundred maniacs, and how he can stop him. Enlisting Nancy’s dad (John Saxon returns!), Neil digs up Freddy’s bones, which are still deadly, while Nancy tries to save as many of the kids as she can within the dreamworld.

This is probably the best New Mutants movie ever made; much better than New Mutants.

The film ends Nancy’s saga while setting things up for a new cast of characters to battle Freddy. At least that’s what you’re supposed to think, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master pretty much wipes the slate clean within the first ten minutes. We covered it briefly, so follow the link to read more.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Saturday, Jan. 25 at midnight at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, MA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void. 

Mara Cecova is a diva and the star of a new way of performing Verdi’s Macbeth. But when she’s hit by a car as she argues with the director in the middle of the street, her role goes to her understudy, Betty. Ironically, in his book Profondo Argento, director Dario Argento claimed that the person playing the role of Betty, Cristina Marsillach, was the most challenging actress he would ever work with.

Despite her initial worries, Betty succeeds instantly on her opening night. At the same time, a black-gloved killer sneaks into one of the boxes to watch before murdering a stagehand with a coathanger. Everyone, grab your barf bags and motion sickness pills; Argento is behind the camera!

Of all the powerful shocks in Opera, perhaps the one that means the most to the viewer is that we share Betty’s torture — she’s repeatedly gagged, tied up and forced to watch the killer at work again and again as he tapes needles under her eyes. They’ll be shredded if she blinks too long or shuts her eyes. It’s like Fulci’s wettest dream ever. In the same way, we are nearly complicit with the crimes we are forced to watch, mainly because they get more and more artfully composed.

Throw in the fact that Betty believes that the hooded killer is the same person who murdered her mother; she follows the Giallo path for a protagonist and confides in someone else rather than the police. Her reason? The killer may know who she is.

Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini, Demons) is on the case because there are so many clues, like the fact that the producer’s pet ravens were found dead after the show. As for Betty, she runs from the police and calls her agent Mira (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s former wife and the writer of Suspiria and star of Shock) for advice.

Betty’s costume gets cut to ribbons, so she asks the wardrobe girl for help. While she works on the dress, they find a gold bracelet they can almost read. But here comes the killer and his needles again, forcing her to watch him kill one more time. The wardrobe girl accidentally swallows the bracelet, so of course, we watch as the murderer slices her throat open to get it back.

Betty runs back to her apartment, where Santini is waiting. He promises to send a detective named Soavi to watch over her (yep, The Church director Michele Soavi), but she doesn’t trust the man and leaves her apartment. That’s when her agent answers the next knock on the door by looking through the peephole. What follows is the grandest kill in the entire film — which is saying something — as we follow the bullet POV-style out of the gun and directly through her eyeball. Again, Fulci is somewhere wringing his hands.

Nicolodi had just ended a long relationship with Argento and did not want to be in this film. However, the shocking and complicated murder of her character changed her mind, even if she had to deal with an explosive device being put on the back of her head to achieve the final shot.

Betty escapes the killer again and runs to the opera house, convinced there is a connection between the murderer and her long-dead and abusive mother. The next night, as she performs, the producer unleashes what is left of his ravens, hoping they’ll find the killer. Oh, they do alright — tearing his eyeball out of his head — FULCI ARE YOU THERE, IT’S ME DARIO — and rewarding you, the viewer, with POV shots that threaten you with vertigo. I’m getting dizzy even typing this.

I don’t want to give away the killer or even the second ending where the killer isn’t dead. I want to talk about the sheer Argento-ness of the final scene, where Betty wanders into a field and releases a lizard, giving him his freedom. Argento claims that Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon inspired this ending. Of interest is that the director does NOT like the Michael Mann movie Manhunter. Me? Well, I love that movie. But I’d love to see Argento’s take. There was also a thought to another ending where Betty would fall in love with the killer.

Your enjoyment of this film comes down to how much you like shocking bloodshed and Argento’s arty side. He based the movie on his own failed staging of Macbeth, basing the role of the nervous producer on himself. And the idea of pins under the eyes? It comes from a joke about how Argento hated it when people looked away during the death scenes in his films.

Believe it or not, Orion Pictures planned on releasing an R-rated version of this in the US called Terror at the Opera with eleven minutes of mayhem removed and the Swiss Alps epilogue. Argento refused, and Orion lost money at a fast clip, so the movie only saw a limited video release.

Opera is something else — filled with style and brutality. I loved it, but remember my warning about how much you can handle.

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.

Before he made gigantic budgeted movies, Peter Jackson directed, wrote, shot, produced and co-starred in this movie that sees aliens using our planet for fast food.

After the New Zealand town of Kaihoro disappears, Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) agents Derek (Peter Jackson), Frank (Mike Minett), Ozzy (Terry Potter) and Barry (Pete O’Herne) are assigned to see what happened, finding aliens that love to eat humans. A battle breaks out and Derek falls off a cliff, but survives with his brain leaking out, covered by a hat.

An insurance adjuster named Giles Copeland (Craig Smith) is taken by the aliens and put in a bathtub stew before being saved by the men. What follows is non-stop violence, as Derek’s brain keeps pouring out of the hole in his head, leading to him grabbing a chainsaw and killing the space monsters, including boarding their ship to home, replacing his brains with an alien one and sawing their leader Lord Crumb (Doug Wren in the suit, Dean Lawrie as the double and Peter Vere-Jones as the voice, as Wren died during the four years this took to make) to bits as he flies directly at the alien homeworld, ready for war.

Using a 25-year-old 16mm Bolex camera, inspired by Tom Savini and wild enough to shoot a scene where he fights himself in two different roles, Jackson went wild on this, even baking the alien masks in his mother’s oven. He’d follow this with Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead, two more movies that are out of control compared to the rest of his movies. He wouldn’t have to invent his own steadicam for the movies that followed after this.

When this came out, it was a hard to find film and you know, it still is — at least in the U.S. — today. While there’s almost no budget, this movie is incredibly inventive and still worth watching today, so long after it was originally made. These aliens don’t have a glowing finger, as the movie says, but in the U.S., the VHS box came with an extra finger sticker so that people wouldn’t be upset that the alien was flipping them off.