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.

Tom DiSimone was back to make another Angel film, but for the third one in a row, we have a brand new Molly “Angel” Stewart. Mitzi Kapture, who was Sgt. Rita Lee Lance on Silk Stalkings takes over the lead and instead of being a lawyer, Angel is now a photographer.

While taking photos, she ends up taking a photo of her mother, the woman that left her fourteen years ago and sent her off to that world of the streets. The same thing is happening with her sister, so she heads out to Los Angeles just in time for her mom to explode. Now, Molly must become Angel again to rescue Michele (Tawny Ellis, Rockula).

Maud Adams, who played two different Bond girls (Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun and Octopussy, as well as a cameo in A View to a Kill) plays the madam who is keeping Angel’s sister in her white slavery porn empire.

After the first two Angel films, this is seriously a let-down. It’s not bad, but the whole idea of Angel’s street family was what made those films work for me. Sure, Dick Miller, Toni Basil, Ashlyn Gere and Julie Smith are in this, which I appreciate, but I’m left missing Susan Tyrrell.

Holy shit, this fucking movie.

If The Abomination is a Shot On Video (SOV) exploration of disease and religion, madness and murder straight out of Texas, this is its oddball rural Michigan brother that has much higher production values.

This is a movie where if I describe it to you, you’ll say, “There’s no way that that is a movie and no way that that much weird can be sustained across an entire movie.”

But you’d be wrong.

Jake’s parents died in a fire that some in town blame him for. He just wants to come to the bar, get drunk and be left alone, but someone has to call him out as a killer. And maybe someone in the bar actually did the killing and not him. But no matter what, Jake really does encounter some black creature in the woods, the kind that people whisper about in that weird bar that Jake should have avoided. But then, even though Jake survives the attack, he’s left with a scar and a disease that makes him — unknown to all in town — the carrier of a strange plague which spreads to every inanimate object that he touches. When anyone touches what Jake has touched, they are dissolved into that object.

Not long into this movie and everyone in town is covered in garbage bags and post-apocalyptic gear and breaking into religious madness and herding cats to use to test anything that has been claimed by the carrier’s horrible touch.

1950’s Sleepy Rock, Oregon may as well be your town during COVID-19, a disease that no one was sure where it came from and how they could get it and all turning against one another. Of course, this movie was about AIDS way back in 1988, but its theme is even more in your face true today than way back when.

Director and writer Nathan J. White honestly should have made more movies than this one and done effort. He was aided by Peter Deming, who was the director of photography on Evil Dead II, Lost Highway and the Twin Peaks 2017 series.

Every time I thought, “This is getting way too silly,” the movie would redeem itself or get even weirder and sillier, which I appreciate to no end. This is why regional films are so important: there were no studio notes or people saying, “None of this makes any sense.” Therefore, it all makes perfect sense.