EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Beach aired on USA Up All Night — I remember watching it! — even if my lists can’t give me an exact date.

You can say that Umberto Lenzi’s films are trashy, sleazy paeans to mayhem and gore. I won’t disagree with you. There’s Cannibal Ferox, a movie that tries to take that genre further and deeper than even I thought it could go. It worked, as its advertising proclaims that it’s “the most violent film ever made” and “banned in 31 countries.” Then there’s Ironmaster, where George Eastman wears a lionpelt on his head and murders his way through a ripoff of Clan of the Cave Bear that’s a million times better than the movie that inspired it. And then there’s Ghosthouse, a slasher haunted house film that’s baffling in its ridiculousness and willingness to get weirder and weirder as time goes on, as just as much time is given to discussing chili and the question “Who is more popular in Denver, Kim Basinger or Kelly LeBrock?” than exploring the House by the Cemetery and watching teens get colorfully pulped into oblivion.

In short, Lenzi is the kind of filmmaker that makes me tear up and yell things at my TV like, “Genius!” and “I love you, Umberto!” Nightmare Beach — also known as Welcome to Spring Break — is his take on the slasher in Miami, halfway around the world from home, celebrating sin, sex and stabbings.

That said, Lenzi for years denied that this was his film.

Supposedly, he had a falling out with the producers and wanted to be taken off the film as he found it too similar to his film Seven Blood-Stained Orchids. Screenwriter James Justice, working under the name Harry Kirkpatrick, took over but convinced Lenzi to remain on set as an advisor. Now, knowing what we know of Italian horror, a name like Harry Killpatrick sounds like a fake Americanized name for the director. Lenzi would continually say, “My contribution consisted solely of providing technical assistance. Welcome to Spring Break should be considered the work of Harry Kirkpatrick.”

However, in his book Italian Crime Filmography, film historian Roberto Curti would claim that Lenzi really did direct the film and refused the credit when the film was done. After all, Lenzi and Justice would work with the same producers to make Primal Rage (with this movie’s writer Vittirio Rambaldi directing and heroine Sarah Buxton showing up, too).

No matter — I love this movie. Yes, the kind of love that I’ve only reserved for Lenzi’s films, where I ignore how patently insane the dialogue is. Actually, I love these films because of that. This movie is everything that you want from a slasher and so much more.

Diablo, the leader of the Demons motorcycle club, is about to be executed for killing a young woman. He confronts his accusers, like her sister Gail (Sarah G. Buxton, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead) and Strycher (John Saxon!), the cop who put him away for good. He tells that he’ll see them all in Hell because he’s innocent and plans on coming back to kill all of them.

A year later, it’s Spring Break time in Miami, which brings football players Skip Banachek (Nicholas De Toth, who left acting for editing, working on movies like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s also the son of Andrew De Toth, who was behind the camera for House of Wax and Crime Wave. He also had an amazing eyepatch, which he needed after he was attacked by a group of young men as he scouted locations in Egypt. They thought he was military leader Moyshe Dayan. He was also married to Veronica Lake, who was just the first of his seven wives) and Ronny Rivera (Rawley Valverde, who has gone on to a career in real estate) to the beach. Ronny is a pip, saying amazing things like “How would you like her to do squats on your tool?” and “You wanna bump short hairs?”

While all the sex and drinking of Spring Break is happening — this movie becomes a teen comedy like Porky’s for a bit — a masked biker has been offing people left and right. This slasher isn’t content to just use simple weapons. No, he’s custom-built his bike to include an electric chair that fries people just like Diablo. So he’s totally the killer coming back from the dead, right?

Of course, Ronny is fated to get in a fight with the Demons and get killed by the biker, just as Skip is due to hook up with Gail. Why does she find him so attractive? Because while everyone else is out and about pouring water all over t-shirts and throwing up all over themselves, he’s refusing beer and being sullen. Seems like perfect mating material, right ladies?

That’s when Nightmare Beach takes a page out of Jaws, with the town council covering up the murders and pinning the blame on Diablo while the real killer has been running free. This point is hammered home when a jokester puts a fin on his back and swims directly at some partying teens, leading a cop to just open fire without warning.

So it is Doc Willet (Michael Parks)? Strycher? Or Reverend Bates (Lance LeGault, Col. Decker from TV’s The A-Team and Elvis Presley’s stunt double in plenty of movies), whose daughter Rachel is out of control? Or Mayor Loomis (Fred Buch, who shows up in Caddyshack, Shock Waves, Porky’s II and The New Kids)?

Nobody is safe, because the killer even takes out Diablo’s girlfriend Trina by blasting her headphones with electricity, sending her eyeball straight out of her head. So is it Diablo? After all…his body is missing from its grave.

I’m not going to tell you who the killer is, other than to tell you that if you watch enough giallo, it all makes sense. After all, that’s kind of what this movie is, along with the added slashtastic gore that this era demanded.

While shot in Miami, this film boasts plenty of Italian connections. Claudio Simonetti did the score, the aforementioned Vittirio Rambaldi wrote it and his dad Carlo did the special effects. Supplementing the fine score are appearances and soundtrack songs by the bands Kirsten, Animal (whose song “Rock Like an Animal” lives up to the idea that every metal band needs a tune that references their own name), Derek St. Holmes (who played on Ted Nugent’s first solo albums and in the band MSG) and Ron Bloom, Rondinelli, Juanita and the band Rough Cutt, whose members included Jake E. Lee (Ozzy’s guitarist after Randy Rhodes, Badlands), Amir Derakh (Orgy), Paul Shortino (Quiet Riot) and Craig Goldy and Claude Schnell, who both played in Dio. If you liked how Demons mixed metal into the film, then you’re going to bang your head throughout this movie.

No moment in this movie that is boring. It’s like doing drugs with the band backstage and then getting to sit in, then go backstage and they offer you your pick of groupie. It has no morals, it knows no laws and all it wants is to ensure that you have the best time possible.

Want to see how this movie is related to Demons? Check out this article on Exploring: So what’s up with all the Demons sequels?

Garagehouse did everyone a favor when they re-released The Weirdo on blu ray.

One of the last movies Andy Milligan made, it’s a film about teenage innocence being destroyed directed by someone who seemingly has no innocence left. Donnie (Steve Burington) just wants to stay in his secret hiding space looking for garbage, but continually he’s set upon by larger and larger packs of bullies. The only kindness he finds in this world is in the disabled Jenny (Jessica Straus).

Jenny has one of those rambling Milligan speeches that ends with a truly haunting few sentences: “When I woke up my dress was all torn and I was bloody…all over here. When I finally got home my mother and sister beat on me. They blamed me for everything that happened. Bobby didn’t call me names after that but he would whisper to the other boys and they would giggle at me in the halls. I never went back to school again after that. I don’t need school. I don’t need anything.”

Donnie finally explodes and destroys everyone that ever hurt him, even decapitating his horrific mother. Heads getting cut off is something that happens regularly in Milligan movies. And seeing as how Andy hated his mother, this time the act takes on more meaning.

Yes, someone is also killed with a pitchfork.

Donnie and Jenny have a love that must battle three thugs — Nails (Shawn Player), Dean (Patrick Thomas) and Vic (Dennis Robbins) — as well as a horrible religious figure named Reverend Cummings (John Miranda), Donnie’s drunken mother wanting to sell him into slavery and the fact that they are in an Andy Milligan movie, which means that these things never seem to end well.

Supposedly, there was going to be a sequel with Donnie has an unkillable monster being controlled by Jenny and coming back for even more revenge. I despise the idea of AI-based cinema, but if there’s any movie I’d want to see made that is impossible to make today, this may be it.

Made in Indonesia two years after Hellraiser by director Susilo S.W.D. and writer Djoko S. Koesdiman, this remake remix ripoff follows the same beats as the original, but has a heart and energy that makes you love it. While later sequels seemed to not even be about the Cenobites — and often weren’t as they were films that started as other stories and had the Lament Configuration shoved in — and the recent film that has none of the lunatic joy and sexiness of the first two or three movies, it seems like everyone is having a blast making this.

Nadia — who is Kristy — has a bad relationship with her recently widowed father Bramasto — Larry — who has married an evil stepmother named Astria or Julia, as we know her in the Clive Barker-directed inspiration. Astria has a secret, as she slept with Bramasto’s brother Lukito — Frank — before her husband and the affair has continued beyond his death, as she’s now part of his occult rituals from beyond the grave.

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The sex has been toned down, as you can imagine with this being made in a highly Muslim country, and the effects and Cenobites do their own thing. The Lament Configuration looks like a vegetable with a strange face in it, the Cenobites appear to be zombies in latex masks joined by a pretty decent female follower of Leviathan.

The effects are pretty fun, too. They often take the form of puddles of blood with eyes in them, which is kind of scary when you think long enough about it. Frank, I mean, Lukito’s transformation is also pretty close to the real thing.

You can get this on DVD from Sloppy Second Sales.

Damian Lee is a Canadian filmmaker responsible for Ski School and Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, as well as writing Watchers. H.G. Welles may not have made a sequel to his book, but that didn’t stop Lee or writers Richard Bennett and Mike Werb.

Bobby could never grow, so he was given an experimental serum from Dr. Kate Travis (Jackie Burroughs) that instantly made him a full grown and super violent adult. Travis’ student Dr. Neil Hamilton (Paul Coufos)  is trying to find a cure, all while animal activists that include his girlfriend Alex Reed (Lisa Schrage, Mary Lou Maloney herself!) and Mark Hales (Réal Andrews) are protesting Prof. Edmund Delhurst (Colin Fox), who is trying to cure baldness with animal experiments.

Of course the rats get huge just in time for protestors to unleash them on the world. Dean White (David B. Nichols) has his Amity Island moment and refuses to shut down the college, all while big rats are just straight up gnawing — yes, this was also called Gnaw — humans.  “But the swim competition,” you hear him yell and yes, you knew it, the rats descend on the swimmers and have a smorgasbord.

The end of this movie is amazing, as they use a rat in heat to lure all the male rats into the open and kill them in the least original way ever: machine guns. But what of Bobby? He’s even bigger and angrier. He kills Dr. Travis and escapes, setting up…well, nothing. There’s no Food of the Gods III.

Travis (John Travolta) and Wendell (Arye Gross) are clubgoers who get hired and taken to Indian Springs, Nebraska to teach the town the modern ways of life before their first nightclub opens. They make big changes, because everything is stuck in the 50s, and soon are even dating two locals, Bonnie (Kelly Preston) and Jill (Deborah Foreman).

The only problem is that they aren’t in the U.S.

They’re in Russia, taken by KGB agent Cameron Smith (Charles Martin Smith) and used to teach Russian agents how to pass for Americans.

The Experts is silly fun and I was surprised to learn that it was directed by SCTV genius Dave Thomas. There’s also a great cast, including Brian-Doyle Murray, James Keach and Rick Ducommun. It was written by Steven Greene, Eric Alter (Hardbodies, Hardbodies 2) and Nick Thiel.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of The Experts has a brand new HD master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative by Paramount Pictures, a new interview with director Dave Thomas and a trailer newly mastered in 2K, You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Based primarily on an article written by Daniel Lang for The New Yorker about Hill 192 in Vietnam, which was later published as a book, this was directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Rabe. It was filmed in Thailand, including one scene shot on the same bridge as the one in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) is home after Vietnam and remembers incidents throughout the film. There was the time that Sergeant Tony Meserve (Sean Penn) saved his life after he fell into a tunnel. The death of “Brownie” Brown (Erik King) and how that affected Meserve. And the time that Meserve, Corporal Thomas E. Clark (Don Patrick Harvey), Private First Class Antonio Diaz (John Leguizamo) and Private First Class Herbert Hatcher (John C. Reilly) kidnap a Vietnamese girl, Tran Thi Oanh (Thuy Thu Le), and repeatedly assault her while Eriksson is forced to stand watch. He attempts to free her but by the end, each man shoots her multiple times and throws her body off a bridge.

Eriksson realizes from Lieutenant Reilly (Ving Rhames) and Captain Hill (Dale Dye) that no one cares what the men did. But after meeting with a chaplain, an investigation happens with Meserve getting 10 years hard labor and a dishonorable discharge, Clark life in prison, and Hatcher and Diaz 15 and 8 years of hard labor. as Eriksoon wakes on a train from his dreams, he sees a young woman who looks exactly like Tran. She forgets his scarf and he runs after her. She smiles and thanks him as he gets some closure.

Quentin Tarantino told Samuel Blumenfeld, co-author of Brian De Palma: Conversations with Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud, how important this movie was to him: “It’s the greatest film about the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now would be classified in another category as Coppola’s film goes beyond the war. De Palma adapts a very small news article, which must have occurred on several occasions in Vietnam or elsewhere. Elia Kazan had also been inspired by it for The Visitors. He had made an intimate film. De Palma treats that same news item in the epic, operatic style that was his signature since Obsession and Blow Out. Soldiers capture a young Vietnamese girl. Before her murder, every member of the unit, with the exception of one of them, tortures and rapes her. The cowardice associated with the forced courage of the character played by Michael J. Fox — who does not participate in the rape and denounces his friends — is very moving. Casualties of War presents the most traumatizing rape sequence in the history of cinema. It’s also one of the best performances from Sean Penn, terrifying as the sergeant squad leader.”