EDITOR’S NOTE: I think this was the movie — we first watched it on January 2, 2018 — where I started to understand Jess Franco. And here we are, many movies and zooms later.

Sure, Jess Franco is just making a new version of The Awful Dr. Orloff with this film, but with bigger stars and plenty of gore. And when you’re looking for a movie to watch at 4 AM — and I often am — it certainly does the trick.

Dr. Frank Flamand (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a plastic surgeon surrounded by gorgeous women who walk arm in arm to his fancy car. But a former patient wants revenge, so she tosses acid at him. Instead, she catches his sister, Ingrid, directly in the face, ruining her gorgeous looks.

Fast forward to a modeling shoot in Paris, where Flamand’s assistant Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie, The Grapes of Death) drugs and abducts Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, Dr. Phibes Rises Again). As she locks her into the basement of the doctor’s clinic, Nathalie gets into an argument with Gordon, a maniac who lives down in the basement and chops off women’s arms for a hobby.

Still with us? Then let’s go to New York, where Barbara’s dad Terry (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) is searching for his daughter, turning to Sam Morgan (Chris Mitchum, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tusk, Bigfoot, Chisum) to help find her. He first travels to a Paris morgue, where her body supposedly is, but the headless victim is not her as it’s missing a mole.

Flamand and his sister meet Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon, who played Orloff in six of his seven films) and learn how they can cut off Barbara’s face to replace Ingrid’s thanks to a Nazi scientist named Dr. Karl Heinz Moser (Anton Diffring, who played numerous Nazis in his career, including in Jerry Lewis’ long lost The Day the Clown Cried). Plus, Franco’s longtime muse, Lina Romay, appears here as Orloff’s wife. When the doctor returns to his office, he learns Gordon has cut up Barbara’s face.

Morgan beats up Barabra’s photo director before a bouncer makes him leave. He has to call Terry with some bad news — his daughter had been working as a prostitute.

The doctor finds another face donor for the surgery, but Moser destroys it. That means they need to find yet another victim, during which Barbara’s credit card is traced to Flamand’s clinic. Morgan starts surveillance and notices that Nathalie is wearing Barbara’s clothes.

He arrives at the clinic and takes out Gordon, but is overcome and locked into the cell with all of the girls. The villains leave them bricked up and with their air running out.

But Sam has sent Barbara’s dad a message, who gets ready to rescue everyone. And then…the movie ends.

Yep.

The original ending of the film had Sam saving the day, but Franco wanted to make it different and leave it open as to whether Sam and Barabara survived. Why? Why ask.

Oh yeah — I almost forgot. This film is replete with surgical horror, like faces being sliced and lifted off, needles into eyeballs, scissors into throats and much, much more. If only it lived up to the promise of its poster, but that said, it’s grimy and seedy fun if you can’t find anything else.

Also known as Mirai Ninja: Keigumo Kinin Gaiden, Warlord and Robo Ninja, this is one of the few successes I can think of when it comes to making a movie out of a video game.

In a future time — hey let’s call it 200X, that line never gets old — cyborgs and humans at war when one of the cyberninjas decides to save a human princess destined to be sacrificed to the machine gods. And if Shiranui the cyberninja ends up being related to the humans and hoping to find his old body, then so be it, and so be machines that have moved beyond zeros and ones to their own digital religion that can summon demons.

Director Keita Amemiya also made Moon Over Tao: Makaraga, which is another wild take on traditional Japan myth mixed with future tech, and Zeiram amongst many other efforts. This looks absolutely wild and you know, do you need an involved story when you have walking feudal buildings and ninjas with laser swords?

There’s a bad guy named Dark Overlord — at least in the English dub — and the evil army is called the Lords of Darkness, so this is like the drawing a metal kid would make in their notebook when they should be paying more attention in school, but no, they should in no way be paying attention because if I paid less attention and drew more and only cared about movies more, my life would be infinitely better than the drone to the grave workaholic that I grew up to be.

Japan is under constant threat from monsters and so is Eiko’s vaunted virginity. So when Tokyo is in danger, she must put her innocence undr threat as well so that her super powers can activate and then things can get simple. I mean, the idea that a woman’s chastity has to be threatened to save a male-dominated country is such a multi-layered thing for my brain to wander around, but then things get simple and Eiko starts beating on frog monsters and taking bubble baths and you’re like, well, I guess I don’t need to use my brain any longer.

Maybe this movie is smarter than it looks, as Star Virgin fights the Statue of Liberty at one point.

This was made by Pony Canyon, who also made video games, and yes, of course there’s a video game tie-in.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dead Man Walking has most of the same cast as Gregory Dark’s 1990 film Street Justice — Brion James, Wings Hauser, Sy Richardson — but throws in Jeffrey Combs. And for that, I rejoice.

Chazz (Combs) is trying to save his boss’s daughter Leila (Pamela Ludwig) from a maniac plague victim named Decker (James), so he teams uo with a merc with the same plague (Hauser) to get in and out of the Plague Zone with the girl.

So yeah — in 1997, people get the bubonic plague and even if they survive, they become Zero Men who will die soon enough, which gets them relegated to controlled areas of their own kind. The corporations have the cure, but we know how that works. The people will never get it.

This movie also has chainsaw roulette, which is much more interesting than thinking about a pandemic any more than I have to.

Dr. Bob Frankenstein (Mark Blankfield, who was also in Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, The Midnight Hour, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the TV show Fridays and took the role of Navin Johnson from Steve Martin in The Jerk, Too) has changed his name to Dr. Robert Frankenheimer and works as an intern at a Los Angeles hospital called, well, General Hospital.

A joke that lands is that Frankenheimer’s lab is in black and white while the movie is in color. And hey — that’s Leslie Jordan as Iggy the assistant and Irwin Keyes as the monster with the brain of a sex mad teenager. One of the doctors, Dr. Alice Singleton, is Kathy Shower, whose resume includes Commando Squad, Bedroom Eyes II, American Kickboxer 2 and The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck.

Keep an eye out for Bobby “Boris” Pickett, the man who sang “Monster Mash.” It’s a song I can’t sing too long, as if I do, I sing it all day for every single question that I am asked and yell things like, “I was working in the lab late one night” and “It was a graveyard smash.”

Director Deborah Sahagun’s only other directing job was Patients, a TV movie that she also wrote, so maybe she specialized in medical comedy.

But this one…don’t show up looking for this comedy to be funny.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director Jim Wynorski made Roger Corman a bet: he could remake the 1957 film with the same budget and schedule thirty years later.

Luckily, he had a not-so-secret weapon. Let’s be honest: Traci Lords being in a Merchant-Ivory movie about malaria would make me watch that movie ten times in a row. Wyrnorski is a smart guy. After all, he told John McCarty in The Sleaze Merchants: Adventures in Exploitation Filmmaking from the ’50s to the ’90s, “While we were at an optical house doing some effects work for Big Bad Mama II, I came across an original print of the old Corman film. Kelli Maroney was there, and Raven, and we had a big hoot watching it. So I said “I think we could have a blast remaking this picture.” And they said “Well, who are you going to get to play the Beverly Garland part?” There were some newspapers lying around, and I saw a story in one of them about Traci Lords. So I said, “Let’s get Traci Lords!” She even looks a little bit like Beverly Garland.”

Lords, however, didn’t want to be found in the wake of the scandalous idea that she made adult films underage. But he convinced her to be in it and was surprised that she improved as an actress as the filming went on.

Traci plays Nadine Story, a nurse who soon gets hired to be the personal blood transfusion person for Mr. Johnson, who is really an alien from the planet Davanna. So yeah, it’s a vampire movie — and fits into the “Not-So-Classic Monsters” theme this week — while also being an alien movie.

To get the movie under budget, some scenes are directly lifted from other Corman movies, like a stalker from Hollywood Boulevard and a foggy scene of a woman being followed from Humanoids from the Deep.

The opening also has a quick blast of scenes from past Corman movies like Forbidden World, Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxy of Terror, Battle Beyond the Sun and Piranha.

This being a Wynorski movie, he filled it with plenty of gorgeous women. So look out for Rebecca Perle (Savage Streets), Becky LeBeau (Bubbles in the hot tub from Back to School; her voice is dubbed by Michelle Bauer), Roxanne Kernohan (Critters 2), Monique Gabrielle (61 magical films to choose from and I’ll pick Young Lady Chatterley II), Ava Cadell (Ava from the world of Andy Sidaris), Cynthia Thompson (Body Count), Kelli Maroney (Night of the Comet) and Kim Sill (AKA Kimberly Dawn, AKA Kim Dawson, star of a ton of movies you snuck watch on Cinemax in your puberty).

Vittorio Rambaldi wrote the script and did the special effects on Nightmare Beach and if you recognize his last name, then you already realize that he’s the son of Italian effects legend Carlo Rambaldi. This was the first movie he directed and he got Umberto Lenzi to write it, which is a great plan, along with James Justice, who used the name Harry Kirkpatrick to write and direct Nightmare Beach but I kind of think he’s also Lenzi, because he also used that name along with Humphrey Humbert, Bob Collins, Hank Milestone, Humphrey Milestone and Humphrey Logan.

A scientist at a Florida university create a rage virus while performing experiments intended to restore dead brain tissue. And then when two college journalists breaks into the campus lab, one gets bitten by an infected babboon and spreads the virus to a gang of rapists dressed like the Cobra Kai on Halloween and a co-ed abortion lover named Debbie (Sarah Bruxton from Nightmare Beach)who all start killing other people on a smaller level as the virus in Lenzi’s Nightmare City.

Man, this movie has it all. There’s Bo Svenson as a scientist! Some of the grossest effects you’ll see in a movie as people drip pus everywhere! A Halloween party with Darth Vader! An Alf doll! Bartles and James wine coolers! An Avoid the Noid poster! Man, this is the most 1988 movie there’s ever been and I just can’t get enough of Italian filmmakers needing to prove it to you that their movie comes from America so badly that it seems like it had to come from another planet.

The music in this really takes it to another level. And yes, the song “Say the Word” also shows up in…you guessed it, Nightmare Beach. Man, they should have just called this one Nightmare Fraternity.

Yes, you may notice that the fourth Curse move was made two years after the third. We can blame that on the fact that it was the last officially completed film by Empire Pictures before the company was seized for failure to pay on loans.

This delayed the movie by five years and TriStar Home Video released it direct-to-video as Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice with no connection to The Curse, The Curse II: The Bite or The Curse III: Blood Sacrifice.

It’s directed and written by David Schmoeller, whose Tourist Trap and Puppet Master are both great movies.

Teacher Elizabeth Magrino arrives at the Abbey of San Pietro en Valle to see the abbey’s first Prior had his vision healed within the catacombs thanks to the Miracle of the Celestial Light. There’s also the issue of a demon that had been trapped in the monastery that has now possessed an albino leper, which is really a sentence that you should go back and read again.

Making this movie work is a solid Italian crew, including cinematography by Sergio Salvati (The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery), a score by Pino Donaggio and production design by Giovanni Natalucci (Once Upon a Time in America, The Stendhal Syndrome). There’s one scene worth watching this movie for, as a possessed statue of Jesus remembers how amazing The Eerie Midnight Horror Show was and gets down off the cross and kills a monk.

Gary Sherman made Death Line, Dead & Buried, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Vice Squad and Lisa, so the guy knows how to make down and dirty horror and action, right? Despite this being the third film in the series, it’s a big budget movie for Sherman, but only Heather O’Rourke and Zelda Rubinstein from the original film and sequel came back.

Now, Carol Anne Freeling (O’Rourke) is in a Chicago high rise and being watched over by Bruce and Pat Gardener (the dream team of Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen). Bruce thinks they just want to get rid of their problem daughter while she’s told that she’ll be attending a school for gifted kids.

One of the doctors in that school thinks that Carol Anne is insane and not touched by evil, so he keeps making her bring up the events of the last film and despite her parents efforts of sending her far away to confuse the horrifying Rev. Henry Kane (no longer Julian Beck, but now Nathan David with Corey Burton doing the voice), all that talking about him brings him right back to her. Not even psychic Tangina Barrons (Rubinstein) can save her, as he uses dopplegangers of Carol Anne to murder her and Bruce’s daughter Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) to kill the doctor.

Of course, everyone must battle in the land beyond death and Pat has to prove that she can be Carol Anne’s mother. Sure, the end sets up a fourth movie, but it never happened.

That may be because real life found a way in.

At the time this movie started production, O’Rourke had been ill with flu-like symptoms and subsequently underwent medical treatment as the movie was filming. The theory was that she contracted giardiasis from well water at her family’s home and given the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. She was prescribed cortisone injections to treat the disease and those injections resulted in facial swelling of the cheeks, which you can see in some scenes.

After O’Rourke completed filming, she returned home to California with her illness in remission. A few months later, she became sick again, her condition rapidly deteriorated and she died a month later as the movie was in post-production.

O’Rourke’s cause of death was ruled congenital stenosis of the intestine complicated by septic shock. It was a shocking tragedy that left an unfinished film that no one was sure how to release.

Meanwhile, Sherman still wanted to reshoot the end of the film and his complicated effects were all done in camera.

The movie was released with little to no marketing, as MGM didn’t want to exploit the death of the young actress. Skerritt and Allen were discouraged from giving interviews about the film to avoid questions.

It’s not great, but the effects are worth watching. The end — where Kane is obviously not defeated — is pretty cool. Too bad no one has done anything with him. Maybe he should go to Amityville.