EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally shared this Paul Naschy movie on August 24, 2020. Now that Mondo Macabro has released it on blu ray for the first time in the entire world, we felt that we should cover it and get more people watching it.

Despite being 54 years old and already surviving one heart attack, Paul Naschy took on the heavy burden of playing multiple monsters in this film, as he appears as Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, The Devil and the human Hector and Alex Doriani. Oh yes — and Waldemar Daninsky, El Hombre Lobo!

For a long time, this movie was never officially released. Before the death of one of its producers, it was to have a lavish budget. It’s better than Naschy usually got, which gives him ample time to get into makeup and play multiple roles. It also got better talent, including Howard Vernon (Dr. Orloff!) and Caroline Munro (Starcrash).

Mostly, Naschy plays Hector, a horror actor devoted to living a carnal life that he compares to de Sade, Gilles de Rais, Vlad Tepes and Jack the Ripper. Each night, Vernon brings him a new prostitute and he dresses up in complicated horror makeup. As you do.

Meanwhile, he’s raising his brother’s son Alex (or Adrian, depending on the translation, played by Naschy’s son Sergio Molina) ever since his sibling killed himself. He may have been helped by the fact that his wife was cheating on him with his own brother. And since he overdosed on heroin, Alex is with Hector, yet lost in his own world of monsters, which is where we get to see Daninsky.

Oh and meanwhile again, there’s a priest in love with a servant girl (Munro) who left him in the past. He pays a homeless man to spy on her and bring him back under penalty of her death. And while all that’s going on, a giallo-style killer is offing people on the grounds of Hector’s estate. And beyond all that — so much is happening! — Alex is trying to bring his father back from the dead.

Imagine Godzilla’s Revenge about Universal Monsters but with the budget and insanity of a Naschy movie and you’ll see why I loved this so much.

The end of this movie — I don’t want to give anything away — somehow has an actor known for Jess Franco movies getting treated like a Lucio Fulci character in a conclusion that somehow makes this an Omen ripoff by way of The Beyond‘s running to nowhere conclusion. It is truly the Dagwood sandwich of sleazy horror scum and I — pun intended — wolfed down every bite.

You can now get this Mondo Macabro release from Diabolik DVD. It comes complete with a new 4K restoration, commentary by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of the Naschycast, a previously unreleased making of documentary and a new interview with Naschy’s son Sergio.

Dimitri Logothetis is still out there making movies. Just last year, he made the Nicholas Cage film Jui-Jitsu and before that he rebooted the Kickboxer movies. But way back when, he made this metal-themed film that finds a college kid named Alex Gardner (Nicholas Celozzi) reliving the murders of a vicious killer who died on Alcatraz.

You know, it’s your typical human drama where your friends find you floating above a bed and when a college professor finds out, instead of recommending therapy, they tell you to go to Alcatraz and face down the ghost of the killer.

Of course, Alex’s brother gets possessed by the killer, so our hero has to find a ghost for help. That ghost would be Sammy Mitchell (Toni Basil), who was once the singer for the band Bodybag. Seeing as how she’s played by the woman who was one of the original seven Lockers, a dancer in films like Head and the choreographer of the Talking Heads’ “Once In a Lifetime” — among so many other creative things — Sammy teaches our hero how to dance.

Dance your heart out Alex, so that your friends can blow your demon-addled brother up real good on Alcatraz! Now there’s a metal lyric that I just wrote, free of charge, that your band may use for inspiration.

Sure, They Live is a science fiction movie based on the 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, but isn’t it really just another western by way of John Carpenter? Nada (Roddy Piper) is a man who Carpenter can work his hatred of the end of the Reagan era out with. So how did he decide to make that into a movie from a major studio? Television.

“I began watching TV again,” Carpenter told Hero Complex. “I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something. It’s all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money.”

Carpenter also saw the story in Alien Encounters, a comic book that Nelson appeared in, rewriting his tale and working with artist Bill Wray. He acquired the film rights to both the comic book and short story and wrote the screenplay himself.

Carpenter made the movie for $3 million and selected Piper because he looked like he had lived a life. Keith David’s part was written just for him, as Carpenter had enjoyed working with him on The Thing.

Nada’s name means, of course, nothing. He has nothing, he has no one and yet, he is the man that humanity must rely upon when facing an enemy that is already us. When he views the world through special glasses, he can see the messages that the unseen they have kept hidden from us for so long.

How long? Why? And to what end? Well, look. This is an exploitation picture through and through. You can see it from the left — that’s where Carpenter seems to be coming from — as the aliens are terraforming our world through pollution and global warming. Or maybe you can see this as the original fake news if you’ve on the other side.

This is a film with both a sad and happy ending. I guess you can just call it a John Carpenter ending, a place where tough men see a middle finger until the closing curtain as the only way to end up on the winner’s side of the balance sheet.

Despite being critically savaged — you can xerox that line for nearly every post-Halloween Carpenter movie — time has been beyond kind to this movie, which seems more and more based on real life and less a work of fiction.

This Alan Hynes poster is amazing.

There’s been a lot made of the fact that Roddy Piper claimed that this movie was based on fact. He’d bring up — it’s on the commentary track he did — that in the 1950s, a company manufactured a TV that planted subliminal messages in women’s brains and he’d seen a doc about it. Well, he may have seen that movie, but he didn’t realize that L’affaire Bronswik was a parody.

Speaking of different groups seeing this movie in their own light, several white supremacist groups have taken to this film as an allegory for how Jewish people run the world. Carpenter even responded to this on Twitter by saying, “They Live is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.”

I think that I was completely unfair to Robowar the first time I reviewed it. Or maybe the fact that I’m doing an entire week of Bruno Mattei movies has caused me to reevaluate things. On second viewing, I loved every single moment of this film.

Vincent Dawn — my favorite Mattei alter ego — worked with Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi to not only rip off Predator, but also The Terminator and Rambo while they were at it. Major Murphy Black (Reb Brown!) leads a squad of commandoes who have given themselves the name  The B.A.M. (Big Ass Motherfuckers).

The team includes Pvt. Larry Guarino (Massimo Vanni, Rats: The Night of Terror), Cpl. Neil Corey (Romano Puppo, who was Trash’s father in Escape from the Bronx), Quang (Max Laurel, Zuma himself!), Soony “Blood” Peel (Jim Gaines, who was in nearly every movie Mattei made in the Phillipines) and Arthur “Papa Doc” Bray (John P. Dulaney, Just a Damn Soldier).

They’ve been sent to the jungle to rescue civilians like Virgin (Catherine Hickland, Witchery) from a guerrilla force, but after wiping out the bad guys, a robot named Omega-1 begins picking them off one after the other. Soon, one of their men named Mascher (Mel Davidson, Strike Commando 2) tells Black that he’s only there to view the battle between Murphy and the killer bot, it’s final field test before it becomes government issue.

And yes, that’s Claudio Fragasso as the killer robot.

Just when you think you’ve kept track of all the ripoffs, Mattei and Fragasso confront you with one more: Omega-1 the Hunter is a human/machine hybrid with organic parts that include the brain of Black’s old friend, Lt. Martin Woodrie. Yes, they went even further and used RoboCop!

I was wrong and apologize for the prior review. After further study, this just may be the third best Predator movie ever made. It’s certainly better than the AVP films. I mean, it starts with a helicopter blowing up real good and that’s where most movies end. All it wants to do is entertain you.

You can get this from Severin or watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We watched this back on June 11, 2018. It’s not as good as it could be, but still lots of fun.

Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, our friends who brought Troll 2 to life, were the writing team behind this, setting the film in the Philippines as a cheap and convenient locale. Lucio Fulci claimed that the script was dreadful and that he tried to rewrite most of it, whereas the producers would contend that Fulci’s initial cut was a little over an hour yet felt much longer than that. They got Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to finish things up. And we’re left to watch the results.

There’s this formula called Death One, which brings back the dead. Why anyone would want to create this for the army is beyond me. But Dr. Holder realizes that this is all just a bad idea, so he resigns. As he goes to surrender his findings, criminals attack (if this movie starts to remind you of Nightmare City, you aren’t alone) and run away with Death One.

That criminal gets infected and even cutting off his own hand — oh that Fulci — can’t stop the outbreak. The hotel he ran to is condemned and General Morton orders everyone there killed and the criminal’s remains burned by his two right-hand men (played, of course, by Mattei and Fragasso).  But just like Return of the Living Dead, the ashes in the air just make things worse. The birds are infected and begin to spread the disease.

What follows is a group of victims gets introduced to us and one after another, they are wiped out with pure malice and utter glee. There are some American GI’s who mention how horny rock and roll music makes them and the girls on the bus they hook up with. There’s a tourist couple, too. No one will be spared when Death One achieves its full power.

Everyone heads to the now abandoned resort and is shocked to find so many weapons. As they are killed off, Dr. Holden looks for a cure while General Morton works on killing off every single person and animal he can find.

Soon, only five of our heroes — Kenny, Roger, Patricia, Nancy, and Joe — are still alive. As soon as I wrote this down, the soldiers kill Joe. Our survivors make their way to a hospital, where Nancy tries to help a woman deliver a baby — bad news, zombie baby — and gets killed. This scene is packed with the gore that you had hoped that this film would bring. Don’t eat while watching, trust me.

Who lives? Who dies? You should just buy this and watch it, right? Right. I will say that I loved Blue Heart, the DJ who talks throughout the film and adored how he keeps doing it even after he joins the ranks of the undead. It reminds me a lot of the DJ as narrator scenes in The New York Ripper.

I almost forgot! There’s an awesome scene where a zombie skull flies out of the freezer and attacks. It wasn’t in the script but instead came from Fulci. He would go on to say that it was one of the most clever things he had come up with and the only thing about this film that he was proud of.

If you’re hoping for the follow-up to Zombi, this isn’t it. It’s still fun and the last twenty minutes or so really pick up. I’d love to see what happens if they ever did a sequel to this.

Severin has released what will probably forever be the ultimate version of this movie, packed with interviews. You’ll hear from just about everyone, including Fragasso, Drudi, Mattei and several of the actors and crew. There’s a big bundle as well if you get this along with Zombi 4 and Shocking Dark. It’s well worth it — this is one company that knows how to make the most out of everything they release.

An elite group of commando assassins — Cobra Squad! — are murdering high ranking U.S. soldiers in the closing days of Vietnam. To stop them, Morgan (Brent Huff, Gwendoline, Nine Deaths of the Ninja) and Hawk (Max Laurel, who played Zuma in two films and Quang in Robowar) must have one another’s back against a massive conspiracy.

Yes, Bruno Mattei — Bob Hunter! — has united with Rossella Drudi and Claudio Fragrasso, heading to the Phillipines and made a movie that makes little to no sense whatsoever. I don’t say this as an insult. Few of the man’s movies have anything approaching a coherent plot. Yet every single one of them wants to entertain you to the point that you are rolling on the floor in incredulity and laughter. They are everything you want them to be.

This is the kind of movie with dialogue like “When you go home, you will forget about me. But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.” and “Ah, Jesus Christ, cocksucker motherfucking sonofabitch.”  Nearly every line is screamed as loudly as possible, as if a twelve year old boy has just been allowed to stay home by himself while his parents go out and he takes advantage of the freedom by repeatedly saying combinations of swear words and never getting tired of using them until he’s hoarse by the time mom and dad come back.

It’s also the kind of film that says that it takes place in 1975 Vietnam but also has plenty of Miami Vice and 80’s buddy cop vibes, along with stolen footage from The Ark of the Sun God, both Strike Commando movies and Double Target. I guess since Mattei made most of those, he’s really just cutting and pasting. You can’t steal from yourself, right? This isn’t a John Fogerty getting sued because his song “The Old Man Down the Road” sounds exactly like Creedence Clearwater Revival situation!

Cop Game also has an all-star cast and by that, I mean actors that ony I care about like Romano Puppo (Trash’s dad in Escape from the Bronx), Candice Daly (After Death), Werner Pochath (Colonel Magnum in Thunder III), Robert Marius (Mad Warrior), Massimo Vanni (Robowar), Ottaviano Dell’Acqua (who is the “We are going to eat you” undead face on the poster for Zombie), Roberto Dell’Acqua (Nightmare City), Jim Gaines (Zombies: The Beginning) and a Brett Halsey cameo.

Mattei made movies in nearly every junk film genre. I can honestly say that I have loved every single one of them and if you want to hear me ramble on about something, ask me about them.

Only the genius — or madness — of Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi could take a Rambo ripoff made in the Philippines and decide to add ninjas, the KGB and no small amount of inspiration from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sgt. Michael Ransom’s (Brent Huff!) owes a debt of honor to his Vietnam squad leader Vic Jenkins (Richard Harris!), who has been captured by heroin-selling terrorists who want ten million dollars worth of diamonds. Now, everyone is going to pay.

How else can I sell this movie to you? Oh yeah, Vic Diaz is in it! Plus, the Strike Commando works with a girl he meets in a bar who is in the midst of a drinking contest named Rosanna Boom. Yes, that’s her name, but I’d forgive you if you called her Marion Ravenwood. She swears more than me, which is saying something, and is played by 1977 Miss World Mary Stavin, who was also in Mattei’s Born to Fight, A View to a Kill, House and Adam Ant’s video for “Strip.”

Italian stalwarts Ottaviano Dell’Acqua and Massimo Vanni also appear in this movie, which was shot concurrently with Zombie 4: After Death. And speaking of recycling, a lot of the jungle action here also shows up in Mattei’s Cop Game, which is also beloved in my world.

The movie has a great twist which I didn’t see coming. Then I realized that the movie had been missing one of the essential Rambo ingredients. We had not yet seen our hero get tortured. Yes, like a southern tag team babyface, he must sell and sell to build for his comeback on the man who has turned heel on him, then emerge from the mud and the blood and the filth and unleash unholy hell on people who only care about diamonds when the Strike Commando’s one true love is the unending thrill of bullets, brawls and blowing things up real good.

You have no idea how excited I am that Severin is releasing a 4K version of this movie.

Man, when Hong Kong filmmakers make a video nasty in no way do they fuck around.

The first category III rated film in Hong Kong, this movie sets out to document the World War II atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731, the secret biological weapons experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

Of course, by proclaiming this as educational, it’s equally about watching Chinese and Siberian prisoners being horribly tortured and killed.

Director Mou Tun-fei went to a film school that had so little money that its graduates could only learn from watching and never getting to make their own movies. The style of his early work is based on the Italian neorealist movement and while he made numerous movies for Shaw Brothers*, he was the first Taiwanese director to make movies on the mainland. After this film — he was working on a children’s kung fu movie when the idea came to him — Tun-Fei would make two more movies, the pornographic Trilogy of Lust and the sequel to this movie, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre.

The main goal of the facility is to learn how to weaponize the bubonic play and destroy China. Somehow, this also means capturing children and operating on their organs while they’re still alive and freezing the hands of people and shattering them with hammers. There’s also a harrowing scene where a cat is attacked by rats and then prisoners are crucified and a flea bomb is meant to be dropped on them before they escape and are run down.

If that doesn’t bother you enough, the effects in this movie include the corpse of a child and the arms of another corpse, this time held by the director’s niece, the only actress brave enough to stand in the cold holding the arms of a dead man.

This is the kind of movie that I don’t think I could make it through again, but for the sake of the sight, my need to see every infamous movie and just plain morbid curiosity, I made it.

*His 1980 film for the studio, Lost Souls, has been compared to Pasolini’s Salò.