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.

In the 90’s, there were two Julie Browns on one channel. MTV. One was the wubba wubba wubba fashionista. The other was a wild redhead who sang songs like “Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” One guess which one we preferred?

Written by Brown (along with frequent collaborator Charlie Coffey and Terrence McNally) and directed by Julian Temple (a groundbreaking video director who also was in the chair for The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle with the Sex Pistols and Absolute Beginners), this movie was a troubled production, with over five months of post-production that led to several scenes and even an entire production number being removed. Due to the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group going out of business, the film went unscreened for over a year.

Three aliens — Mac (Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park), Zeebo (Damon Wayans, The Last Boy Scout) and Wiploc (Jim Carrey, Man in the Moon) notice a broadcast from Earth filled with aerobics and half-naked women. They follow the signal to Earth and the home of Valerie (Geena Davis, The Long Kiss Goodnight), a manicurist who has lost her fiance, Ted (Charles Rocket, who famously said fuck on Saturday Night Live in an era where that would ruin your career). The aliens crash land in Valerie’s pool and when she investigates, she smacks her head against the UFO.

Mac decides to miniaturize her and bring her inside the ship. Why is the ship miniaturized? I’ve wondered the answer to this question for decades. The aliens quickly assimilate Earth culture via TV and get a makeover from Valerie’s best friend Candy (Brown), then go to a nightclub where Mac and Valerie fall in love and Deebo has a long dance battle that defies any description that I can write

Valerie and Mac make love while Zeebo and Wiploc go to the beach with pool boy Woody (Michael McKean, This is Spinal Tap). Through some miscommunication, they end up robbing a convenience store and get arrested, along with Mac and Valerie, who have come to rescue them.

The aliens are taken to Ted’s hospital, where he learns that they are aliens. Valerie and Mac convince him that he’s gone insane and take everyone back to her house, where the aliens prepare to leave for their home planet. Thinking that Mac has picked his home planet over her, Valerie plans on marrying Ted in Las Vegas. Of course, she soon realizes the error of her ways and goes into space to be with her true love.

The soundtrack is rich with the music of the 80’s: Hall & Oates, Information Society, the B-52’s, Depeche Mode, the Jesus and Mary Chain and several songs by Brown, including “Brand New Girl,” “Earth Girls Are Easy” and “Cause I’m a Blonde.”

This is a movie packed with fun. It’s the kind of future that the 50’s thought that the 80’s would be. Throw in an appearance by the “patron saint of Los Angeles” Angelyne and you have a time capsule of the goofier side of MTV era pop culture.

BONUS: Frankenstein and Calamity Jane’s cars from Death Race 2000 and Robby the Robot make cameos in the film, as well as the lectroids from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension!

There’s a scene in A Cat in the Brain where Fulci directs a Nazi orgy like a deranged madman. The results are what opens Sodoma’s Ghost, as a group of Nazi deserters and prostitutes are at play while Willy films the proceedings. Everyone dances to strange jazz music and claps their hands while watching films of the war, then the bombs fall. When you combine this intriguing beginning with a great movie poster, you can see why I picked Sodoma’s Ghost for a 3:25 AM viewing.

Years later, six American students — Mark, Paul, John, Anne, Celine and Maria — are traveling to Paris when they find the house we just saw in the opening. It’s abandoned but fully furnished, and by fully furnished, I mean it’s packed with all sorts of pornography on the walls. And oh yeah. It’s also duly appointed with Nazi ghosts.

Also, there is a flea market here, the Rossi Pop Up Market, that used to be a movie theater. You walk from theater to theater, some of which are turned into stores and some of which I am certain are now places where hoarders live during the week. This Nazi house looks like one of those theaters, with the seats all ripped out and a man in rags ready to surprise you as you search for old DVDs and only find his collection of old bags of Wonder Bread and stacks of old copies of Grit.

Is it politically correct of me to say that I would like to think that sex-crazed Nazis would have had better taste in decoration than this?

Also: It’s 21 minutes into a Fulci film and no one has lost their eye yet.

That night, Anne sleeps alone in a room when the ghost of Willy returns and slaps her around, bloodying her lip. He then licks the blood off and they have the most awkward kiss ever while the worst background music ever created plays and she bleeds all over the place. Evil Nazi ghost Willy is also a worse kisser than Randy West. He makes her confess that she loves it. She then wakes up all alone again, as it was all just a dream.

Every time the kids try to leave, they get stuck. The roads all lead back to the house. The car breaks down. The police station answers with evil voices. The phones are cut. And then they’re locked in the house. As cabin fever sets in, Maria starts to lose her mind.

Mark, drunk and wandering, finds some Nazis playing cards. He joins them only to play Russian roulette for Willy, which he survives and is rewarded with a prostitute. As he starts to touch her, his hands go right through her body and he’s covered with blood. He runs away and sees Paul as a Nazi, then tumbled down the steps to his death.

Maria then is seduced by a prostitute — who is also a ghost — who tries to turn her against her girlfriend Anne, who she claims is cheating with Celine. Speaking of Anne, a possessed version of her tries to get with Paul before turning into a corpse. Sex hijinks amongst friends was never this gory. Or ridiculous.

Paul and John find the film of the Nazis as Mark’s corpse begins to rot. They play the film and just as the ghosts arrive, the bomb drops again and the screen goes to black.

When everyone wakes up, Mark is back alive and it’s all a dream. The teenagers finally drive away, safe from the Nazi menace.

This movie just makes me sad. Anyone but Fulci could have directed it — it’s free from the trademark verve and spark of mania that he brought to films where you expected nothing, like Conquest. It’s rote and boring, with it’s running time feeling way too long. Honestly — any movie packed with Nazi ghosts, sex and violent death should be way more exciting than this.

There are moments in Witchery that approach the madcap goofball lunacy of La Casa 3. But you have to really search for them. Just by looking at the cast — Linda Blair! David Hasselhoff! — you think that you’d be in for a much crazier ride. This has even been titled Ghosthouse II, but make no mistake. This ain’t no Ghosthouse.

An angry mob chases a pregnant woman to a house where she dives from a window, like Oliver Reed in Burnt Offerings. I say like because it’s the exact same shot. Jane (Blair) wakes from this dream, which is never explained.

Don’t worry. This movie has no interest in story. And I don’t mean that in a Fulci kind of way, like an absolute film. No, this movie does the things where you’d expect a story to happen and ignores them.

But hey, let’s talk about our heroes. Gary (Hasselhoff) and Leslie are a couple who have decided to head off to an island to do research on witchcraft. They are there because some weird lights show up on the beach. Also — Leslie is a virgin. That’s right. A virgin. It will be mentioned again. And again. And just when you think it’s been mentioned too many times, it will be mentioned again.

Jane’s younger brother and her parents are all coming to the island too. Her parents want to turn it into a club, so they bring the architect, Linda (Leslie Cumming, in her second straight piece of shit on our site after Robowar) and the realtor’s son.

Oh yeah — this method actress went crazy and haunts the island. She kills the boat captain who brings them there to start before killing off the majority of the cast in ways that echo the seven deadly sins for reasons that are never explained. Yes, things like motivation, the hero’s journey and the three-act structure are all ignored by this film. That’s forgivable if crazy shit happens. Sure, there’s demon sex, but it feels like too little, too late (the most out of context sentence I’ve written in 2018!). There’s also a woman impaled on a swordfish and Hasselhoff getting a blood bukkake, so if you just edit down those scenes into a 3 minute or so supercut, this is a much better film. Like this scene, where Hasselhoff discusses his childhood friend.

What blows my mind is that Tommy — the little brother — has a tape recorder that fits into the plot and it’s totally a Sesame Street model. You’d think they’d want their brand to not appear in a movie where a demon’s penis makes a woman’s vagina start bleeding.

Hey look — any movie where David Hasselhoff gets impaled can’t be all bad. But Witchery sure tries. If only it pushed itself to be as deliriously stupid as Troll 2 or as devoted to gore as, well, take your pick of Fulci haunted house films. But you do get a pregnant and possessed Linda Blair — poor Linda — chasing folks around a house before doing a swan dive to her doom.

The end of this film is a shock ending that has nothing to do with anything that came before. A nurse comes in to tell Leslie that Tommy is fine and so is her baby. She answers, “My baby?” The screen loses color and then a totally 80’s schmaltzy love song plays. Seriously, you gotta hear this shit to believe it. It redeems much of the film.

I watched the ending three times in a day to write this and I couldn’t remember any of it. That should either point to how many movies I watch or how uninspiring this film is. Either way, you can decide for yourself and watch it on Shudder. Or order the double disk of this and the vastly superior Ghosthouse at Shout! Factory.

Ghosthouse has nothing to do with House or House 2. Then again, it also has nothing to with Evil Dead or Evil Dead 2, movies that are known as La Casa and La Casa II in Italy. But hey, who is keeping score? As you’ll learn before the end of the week, the next two La Casa movies have nothing to do with this one, either!

Director Umberto Lenzi (Eaten Alive!, Nightmare City) directed this Joe D’Amato production, which was filmed in the same house as Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery!

The film starts in the past, right after Henrietta has killed her pet cat. Her father locks her down in the basement, along with her creepy clown doll. He tells his wife that their daughter has to be possessed by the devil, but before they can make a move, she kills dad with an axe to the head and explodes a mirror, sending shards into the eye of her mother, Fulci style. Holy shit, this movie hasn’t even started yet and it goes for the jugular!

Let’s meet our hero. Paul Rodgers is just your typical guy. He does data entry via ham radio, with his call letters proudly on top of his set-up, made with a wooden router, like something your aunt would have in her house that smells like liver. All he wants to do is sit on the bed and eat chili with his girlfriend, Martha, except he keeps hearing cries for help over the radio.

Also — I should mention that all of the dialogue in this film sounds like it’s being said by complete maniacs, adding to my enjoyment of the film. It also has moments of insane dialogue padding — by that I mean, Paul discussing Simon Le Bon with a female ham operator or asking who is more popular in Denver, Kim Basinger or Kelly LeBrock.

They track the signal to the house we saw at the beginning (throughout the film, I kept yelling, “It’s Dr. Freudenstein’s house! Stay out of his house!” but no one listened) and meet another ham radio operator. Obviously, ham radio was the internet of the 80’s. As they walk on the porch, Martha says that the house has an evil aura (her thick accent makes translating her nonsensical dialogue a master’s class in Italian exploitation dialogue divination) and refuses to go in. Paul just says, “Yeah, fuck it. Fuck. It.” and goes in.

They meet the Dalens, Jim, Mark and Tina, along with Susan. These friends have been interested in the house and Jim may have been the ham radio operation that Paul heard scream. Don’t get too used to anyone — anyone involved dies horribly, like a flying fan blade to the throat, a hammer to the brain, getting chopped in half, being hung and even the basement floor splitting apart to reveal a milky substance that works like acid. Even a wacky hitchhiker who walks through the house looking for silver to steal gets whacked. Man, even Paul gets killed in the film’s shock twist ending as he gets smooshed by a bus.

It’s all Henrietta’s fault. She’s the kid we saw kill her parents earlier and she just keeps it up. Why? Well, her father stole a clown doll from another child’s coffin and gave it to her. You know how these things happen.

There’s a completely deranged scene where Martha finds the doll, leading to paper rabbits, feathers and other toys attacking, ending with the doll sneaking up behind Martha and trying to choke her. Becca yelled, “No wonder this girl turned bad. Her toys are shitty!”

You even get Donald O’Brien (Dr. Butcher M.D. himself!) as Valkos, a hitchhiker/backwoods weirdo/the old guy that warns kids. Here, he stalks and kills at random, including the aforementioned hammer to the head kill, after which he shuts the coffin lid on a still alive mortician.

You like severed heads? You like ghost dogs? You like dialogue about Jack the Ripper and the Salem Witch Trials that makes no sense? You like policemen in over their heads spewing jargon-filled exposition? How do you feel about explosions and maggots? Or synthesized sounds that repeat over and over until they make you feel trapped like the characters in the film? Then guess what? I’ve got the film for you.

In case you didn’t pick it up from the context clues, I love this movie!

It’s actually easy to find, thanks to the Shout! Factory release. And if you subscribe to Shudder, you can find it right here!

An Italian ripoff of both Predator and Terminator starring Reb Brown (Yor Hunter from the Future), directed by Bruno Mattei (The Other Hell), from a script by the husband and wife team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi (who concocted Troll 2, a movie that is at the same time not a sequel and not about trolls)? You had me at Italian ripoff.

Major Murphy Black (yep, Reb Brown) is the leader of a team of commandos that are on a mission in the jungle. Only Mascher knows why they are really there — to test his new invention, Omega-1 (who is played by writer Claudio Fragasso), a robot that looks like a BMX racer with scuba gear.

But first, they have to rescue Virginia (Catherine Hickland, Witchery) from soldiers who are overtaking her hospital camp. Just like Predator, the team easily kills all of the terrorists/evil guys/generic villains, but it’s just to set up the real story. Yep, Masher wanted to see how his creation would stack up against Murphy.

The robot is smart enough to kill everyone, even his creator, and destroy the one device that is supposedly the only thing that can kill it. Also, Omega-1 is really a cyborg with he brain of Murphy’s old friend, Lt. Martin Woodrie.

Only Murphy and Virginia survive, despite numerous attacks by the cyborg. At the end, the cyborg corners Murphy in the jungle and shows him how to initiate his self-destruct sequence. And that’s that.

Are you wondering just how close this movie is to Predator?

There’s your answer right there.

Even I can’t defend the fact that I waste nearly ninety minutes of my life watching this movie. On my deathbed, I will pull my family close and whisper, “I only regret one thing. Robowar.” Hopefully, they realize that I mean a Bruno Mattei movie and don’t think that it’s a Rosebudian cipher and they have to go on a quest to discover what I mean. I also hope that none of them watch Robowar.

That said, it is on Amazon Prime.

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 wanting 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.

I came across this film on YouTube and had no idea what I’d be watching. I’d give it five minutes and then be done with it, I said. And then I realized that the film was nearly over and I’d been quite interested in the proceedings. Life’s funny like that.

Written and directed by Dario Piana, this sequel to Nothing Underneath is the only giallo I’ve seen that has both Huey Lewis and the News and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (you got close, Body Double) on the soundtrack. A major point of the film is that the models are trying to put together a video for Frankie’s “Warriors of the Wasteland!”

Let me see if I can summarize this one quickly for you. A fashion agency is shooting videos that feel very BDSM and feature really long, intricate daggers. Those models are all prostitutes, except for one, who won’t give in and have sex with an old man in a whirlpool, so everyone rapes and kills her. Her car goes off a cliff, but an autopsy proves that she was shot in the head first. That said — everyone who was there starts getting killed, one by one.

Some of the death scenes are really well shot and the murder weapon is quite insane looking. One of the murders, with a model falling off a large building into water, looks particularly good.

This one’s hard to find, outside of YouTube, but the great folks at CultAction have it.

Roderick Thorp wrote the book Nothing Lasts Forever in the hopes that it could be made into a film. Seeing as how Frank Sinatra had just starred in the adaption of Thorp’s The Detective and this story would be a sequel, it seemed like a sure bet. But then the film went into development and it would be nine years before his film hit the screen.

The final film — Die Hard — features action sequences taken almost word for word from the book. Where it differs is by making its hero younger, changing his name from Joe Leland to John McClane and putting his wife, not his daughter, in danger.

Sinatra had first right of refusal to make the film, but once he stepped down, Die Hard was offered to Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Charles Bronson, Robert Deniro, Richard Dean Anderson, Mel Gibson, Don Johnson, Burt Reynolds, Richard Gere, Kurt Russell, Dennis Quaid, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Michael Keaton, Patrick Swayze, Bill Paxton, Mickey Rourke and Clint Eastwood. Whew. It seems all of Hollywood was offered the film. Yet all of these casting choices seem ridiculous today because only one man could star in this film: Bruce Willis. But at the time, he was an unproven and virtually unknown actor.

Do I really have to explain the plot to you, dear reader? It’s simple: McClane is a man out of place, a New York cop at a fancy Christmas party trying to reconnect with his estranged wife when terrorists take over. The set-up in incredibly simple, but the resourcefulness of our hero — and the charisma of a young, hungry Willis — take this film from the ordinary to the classic. Throw in a classic villain in Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber and you have a movie worth watching and rewatching.

There’s been some debate as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Of course it is. It symbolizes the worry behind every holiday party, of trying to repair broken relations during the most wonderful time of the year. The awkwardness of attending your spouse’s Christmas party? Die Hard may get unrealistic later, but in the way that it translates McClane’s feelings of not belonging in Nakatomi Plaza, Die Hard strikes me as bracingly honest. The holidays are a rough place for a cop whose only real relationship is the one he has with his job. And throughout the terrorist-filled night, he hopes to use his wits to survive, save the wife he realizes he has lost and give the Vreski family the worst Christmas ever.

Die Hard also has the distinction of staring two character actors who excel at playing what can only be described as real dicks: Paul Gleason (The Breakfast Club) and William Atherton (Ghostbusters). Their IMDB pages are rich with roles that make you want to punch them in the belly.

From how Hans Gruber is treated as one of the stars of the film to its idea of one man against overwhelming odds, Die Hard has influenced every action movie that followed it. But is it a Christmas movie? Well, we don’t have ornaments on our tree from any other film!