As you watch this movie, keep in mind that twin brothers named Mark and John Polonia and their friend Todd Michael Smith were around seventeen. This movie is exactly the sheer mania that is inside the mind of a child about it be a man, as the three guys are all brothers in this, stuck at home as their mom is working multiple shifts just in time for a horrific monk to move in next door and destroy their fragile brains.

Todd is reading a book about Herschell Gordon Lewis. John is calling a sex line, because that’s what guys did in 1988 when there was no world wide web in the way we know it now. Mark is out shoveling snow. And then stuff gets absolutely bonkers: John craps out a blade that also castrates him; Mark ties up Todd and caresses his skin with a razor blade and, again, castration; John takes a shower — there’s no Hollywood attempt at hiding the male nudity — when a homemade — yet raw as fuck — penis monster assaults him. Also: an elf pisses in Mark’s face.

Man, what were these kids on? High on camcorders? This movie is filled with latent fear of post-puberty becoming a man and leaving the nest. And man, like all SOV, you get to be a psychiatrist, because there’s some definite trauma at the idea of homosexuality becoming a normal part of your life.  I have no idea if they intended this but even if not it’s all here on tape, stomach explosions, masked killers and authentic 80s beige haze everywhere.

You could gather all of Hollywood, give them all of the money and they would never make a movie this great. Or weird. Or with so much dick.

Some of this movie was remade into Splatter Farm, the movie the Polonias were at one time best known for, as well as the actual remake of this movie, Lethal Nightmare.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Unlike many of the shot on videos featured on the site the last few days, The Killing Edge was directed by someone who had made several films, Lindsay Shonteff. One of his first films was 1964’s Devil Doll, but he may be best-known for a series of James Bond remix remake ripoff movies that started with Licensed to Kill and continued to include Spy Story, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun. He also made The Million Eyes of Sumuru, Permissive, Night After Night After Night and as budgets lowered in the mid 80s, he started shooting on video. Beyond this movie, he also made the video giallo Lipstick and Blood.

Working from a script by Robert Bauer (who also wrote Shonteff’s Vietnam movie How Sleep the Brave), this is the story of a man — Bill French (Steve Johnson) — wandering the post-apocalyptic wastelands with only a stuffed teddy bear as he searches for his family, who he finds just in time for them to be killed by robotic Terminators, which is why this was released in West Germany as Killing Edge – Super Gau Terminator.

They are not robots. This is not exciting. In fact, it seems like it was made up while it was being made, just like many shot on video projects. The difference is, again, Shonteff who at one point was someone who made actual films.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Droid is a science fiction movie created by British director Peter Williams, who is really adult film director Philip O’Toole, because this movie is really a re-edited version of the 1987 film Cabaret Sin, a movie in which sex is outlawed except inside the Pleasure Dome, where it is performed live for those who can afford to attend. In other words, it’s Cafe Flesh.

Yet the film that has emerged from the VHS porn wasteland and become a Blade Runner post-apocalyptic movie that you didn’t have to walk through those adult saloon doors to rent. It takes place in Los Angeles, in 2020, and yes, the future is not now.

The world is policed by cops known as Eliminators who are battling the fascist Droid Warriors and their leader Azteca (Lorrie Lovett). Once, those Droids were simply servants and now, more and more, they are breaking free from their programming. The protagonist of this remix is Taylor (Greg Derek), who has a Droid of his own named Rochester (Kevin James, not the comedian) who sounds like a certain protocol droid and looks like a robot from Sleeper or a visitor from V. All Taylor cares about is his ex-wife Nicola (Krista Lane, billed here as Rebecca Lynn), who has been brought into the war and is being charged with stealing a digital decoder to help the Eliminators.

Yet all Taylor seems to do is sit at that club and watch people couple up, like Herschel Savage, Bunny Bleu (if you’re amazed that I knew who she was instantly, well, you didn’t grow up in the late 80s and early 90s), Candie Evans, Kristara Barrington, Keisha and Tom Byron, who is listed as dancer #3.

This is a movie that has a geisha having on-stage sex with a samurai warrior while a man has a ventriloquist doll on his shoulder like some demented bird as a Reformer android with glowing red eyes looks all menacing and fog is everywhere and neon and cigarette smoke and this is what I thought strip clubs would look like and have been forever let down that robots and synth didn’t dominate things, just women trying to make some money off as sad men drink and aggressive bros toss crumpled up dollar bills in furtive gestures of not understanding that they are not truly in control.

THX-1169 is such a better name for this movie.

There are the cheapest Blade Runner cars in this and I love them so much. I’m a fan of movies that in no way need to have science fiction in them, like Obsession: A Taste for Fear, and that makes me want more needless tech and so much fog in everything. When you think of 1988 in the adult world, everyone wanted to be the Dark Brothers or Stephen Sayadian and that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.

At the center of the end of the world movies, Naziploitation, smut without smut, Phillip K. Dick and when pornographers saw art within their industry and thought, “Anyone can make Night Dreams or New Wave Hookers” and totally made strange inferior junk like Party Doll-A-Go-Go (am I outing myself or what? I mean, at least that movie has Tianna, Raven and Madison Stone in it), not to mention Star Wars xerox cinema, off the rack futuristic costumes and fog, glorious rolling fog, you will find Droid.

Directed by Giovanni Arduino and Andrea Lioy, this Italian SOV* movie has a great title that there’s no way that it can live up to.

Bernie has been burnt up from being hit by a drunk driver so he remains high as much as possible and hides his injuries under a white Klan hood because the car was black. His receptionist sister Jenny, who everyone thinks is ugly but in no way looks that way, abuses him by repeatedly kicking him in the ballbag before injecting him with her urine, which gives her mental power over him. I think you have to pay for that kind of treatment.

There’s also a garage band called The Sick Rose that plays throughout the movie as Bernie kills everyone who has been tormenting his sister. I’m still trying to figure out the punk rock cop whose dad was a banana peel falling for cowboy.

It does have someone getting their face jammed into a meat slicer and several people cutting off their own dicks and then eating them. In case you wondered why I’m not the kind of reviewer who gets to be on Criterion blu rays and a talking head on Shudder shows, it’s because there’s no call for someone to discuss the best self-castration scenes in SOV movies.

I mean, regular Italian exploitation horror has scenes of eyeballs being destroyed, drill presses through people’s heads and people literally puking their guts out. Actually all of those things happen in City of the Living Dead. Just imagine how much more disgusting Italian filmmakers who aren’t really filmmakers are. That said, just imagine how many long stretches there are of this film there are where absolutely nothing happens.

*I get this was shot on Super 8 but you know what I mean when it comes to the quality. I know that I’ll get at least one letter if I don’t have this disclaimer.

Jeff Hathcock also made Victims!, Night Ripper! and Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell. This time around, he takes us to the worst parts of Los Angeles where sex workers are being murders and the cops keep fumbling around in the dark. Bernie Navarre (Simon de Soto) and Grant Jordan (Lawrence Scott) get help from undercover officer Kelly Anderson (Susanne Smith) who acts as one of the ladies of the night to draw out the killers, who end up being Artie Benson (Larry Thomas, no soup for you) and Lenny Miller (Guy Ecker). Their gimmick is to pretend to be making a movie and then film each kill.

Then Bernie’s former partner, Frank Phillips (Tommy Kirk, a former Mousketeer) comes in the picture and decides that he needs back on the force. As Kirk said to Filmfax, “The film had some problems…. I played a cop who has been kicked off the force because he was a drunk and had accidentally killed somebody. But he wanted to be back on the force, to be a cop again, so he goes off on his own and tries to solve this string of serial killings in the Los Angeles suburbs… That picture was a good example of a case of good intentions.”

This is a movie packed with grime that really gets into the darkness of its killers and then mixes in dialogue like a hooker saying, “Why don’t we discuss this over a cock tail? Your cock, my tail.” Mix that in with a death by power drill and you have a movie that attempts to be an erotic thriller on a budget, shot on video yet feeling very procedural all the same. This would pair nicely with L.A. AIDS Jabber if you want to really delve into the City of Angels shot on video tracking filled darkness.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For another article on this, click here. There’s also an interview with director Wim Venk on the site.

Wim Vink only made six movies — including Pandora, Danse Macabre, Heaven Is Only In Hell and this one — but man, this movie is something else. It starts in a very ordinary way, as Debbie (Angelique Viesee) is relentlessly treated like utter garbage by the other girls and even a teacher (Ad Kleingeld) that seems sympathetic just wants to roughly take her on her teenage twin bed.

Is it any wonder that the girls all conspire to spray Debbie in the face with hairspray and then laugh as she’s hit by a truck? Well, that’s taking it far. And taking it too far would be gyrating atop her and taking photographs of the grisly carnage. Want it to get even worse? While she struggles in the ICU, a nurse who just ends up being the mother of one of the popular girls injects her in the eye with poison like a SOV Dead and Buried.

Debi arises and goes on a campaign of terror like a telekinetic-less Carrie, using a chainsaw and the pounding beats of composer Rob Orlemans to take twenty-five minutes of torment and finally have it up to here and then unleash pure traumatic hatred on everyone who has ever done her wrong. It’s also in Dutch and everyone speaks stilted English which only serves to make it all that much more foreign.

I love seeing this through decades of tape erosion and tracking between each piece of action as the synth beats my help into pulp. It’s not magic, but it’s quite close.

You can download this from the Internet Archive and watch it on YouTube. There’s even a making of on altohippiegabber’s page.