Arabella Black Angel (1989): Also known as Angel: Black Angel, this is one of the sleaziest giallo that I’ve come across. Seeing as how I’ve watched Play Motel, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Giallo In Venice and own multiple copies of The New York Ripper, that’s saying something.

Director Stelvio Massi was the cinematographer or director of photography for plenty of great movies like The Case of the Bloody Iris, Sartana’s Here…Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin and Giovannona Long-Thigh. He knows how to make things look gorgeous, particularly in the way he shoots women, which comes in more than handy here.

Arabella is a woman obsessed with the carnal act. Sadly, her husband has been rendered impotent and confined to a wheelchair ever since he wrecked his car while she was dirty facetiming him (he was driving, because the opposite is impossible) on their wedding day. She’s filled his role with trips to brothels, including one that gets raided while she’s assaulted by a cop. She gets back at that officer by inviting him back to her place and while he’s yodeling in the valley, she bops him upside the head with a hammer. Her cucked husband, who has been watching all of this hammer smashed face action go down finally feels the blood flow down below, which means that he has to keep setting up his wife to kill off more and more people. He also finally gets back the urge to write and they start to fall in love again, but of course, he has to keep watching her make love to other people.

Also: lots of genital mutilation.

Ida Galli plays the mother-in-law. You’ll remember her from The Sweet Body of Deborah and Fulci’s The Psychic. Rena Niehaus, who is in the absolutely baffling strange film Damned In Venice, is also on hand.

The problem for our heroine is that everyone she makes loves to dies, including a cowboy who gets his member sliced clean off. The next day, as the cops are gathering evidence, one of them is so upset that he can’t stop eating his sandwich. The world of this movie is insane, because there’s a photo of that mutilated wang on the cover of the next day’s newspaper.

There’s also a scene in the Freak Boy Zone, a place where Arabelle cruises all the gay men and picks one to take home. This entire moment is absolutely insane, as the homosexual side of town feels like it came out of an Enzo G. Castellari post-apocalyptic movie.

This movie looks grubby, makes little to no sense and will offend pretty much everyone that watches it. That means that you’re definitely going to want to watch it.

The Killer Is Still Among Us (1986): Also known as Florence! The Killer is Still Among Us and The Killer Has Returned, you have to admire the chutzpah — or the gall — of a film to have the disclaimer “This film was made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice,” after you’ve just watched 83 minutes of a killer graphically mutilating women and their most intimate of parts, as if this were some bid to outdo Giallo  In Venice or The New York Ripper.

Based on the true story of the Florence serial killer “The Monster of Florence,” this was written by Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, All the Colors of the Dark, My Name Is Nobody) and Giuliano Carnimeo (who directed four of the Sartana films under the alias Anthony Ascott, as well as The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Ratman).

Directing this movie — and helping with the script — would be Camillio Teti, who produced The Dead Are Alive and Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s attempt at a non-mondo, the ironically named Mondo Candideo.

Much like a scene out of Maniac, a couple on lover’s lane is blown away mid-aardvark by a gloved killer. What separates the uomini from the ragazzi is that the killer then uses a knife and a tree branch to do things that made me turn my head from the screen for an extended period of time.

Christiana Marelli has been studying the killer in criminology class to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the cops and her teachers. This leads to her being stalked via phone and in person by the killer. Of course, seeing as how Alex, that formerly mentioned boyfriend, is never around during these killings, you can see why she starts thinking he could be Il Mostro.

The film moves from the giallo into the supernatural as our heroine attends a seance where the medium has a vision of the killer decimating a camping couple, soon developing the same wound that the victims just received.

What does Christina do? Run to the theater to see if Alex is there or not, proving that while he is waiting for her, he certainly could still be the killer. If I were her professor, I’d have given her a zero out of thirty.

After all this, she just sits down to watch a movie with him and it ends up being the same film we’ve just been watching. That’s either a huge cop out or just how you expect a giallo to end.

The Sister of Ursula (1978): After their father’s death, two gorgeous sisters – the sensitive Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi, Suspiria, Cut and Run) and promiscuous Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario, Zombie, Nightmare City) decide to escape to the seaside resort town Amalfi. Oh, if they only knew the madness that waited there!

The island is quite literally awash with the wrong guys, the wrong girls, the wrong couples and a killer who tears people apart with the biggest member this side of Incubus. Get ready for a movie that isn’t sure if it wants to be sexploitation or giallo but is ready to do everything that it can to entertain you.

Director and writer Enzo Milioni also was behind the Lucio Fulci presented Luna di Sangue. In this movie, he’s created a world of pleasure and murder, which at times exists side by side. It seems from the cut I’ve seen that there may have been even longer — and more explicit — lovemaking scenes.

So who is the killer? Dagmar’s new man Filipo (Marc Porel, The Psychic), who just might also be a drug smuggler? The hotel owner (Yvonne Harlow, who claimed to be the great-granddaughter of Jean Harlow)? Perhaps dad isn’t quite so dead? Or are the sisters both insane? After all, Dagmar is given to loving herself just feet away from her sister, who hates just about everyone she meets.

According to Milioni, Porel was a drug addict who had earned a bad reputation as an actor. Magnolfi got him hired for the film and he behaved for the entire shoot and ended up getting clean. Sadly, while shooting a commercial in Monaco, he relapsed and overdosed.

The fourth Forgotten Gialli set is packed with utter sleaze and I say that in the nicest of ways. Each movie is newly scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, plus its packed with features like interviews with Enzo Milioni, a commentary track for The Killer Is Still Among Us by Rachel Nesbit and audio essays by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas as well as trailers and image galleries. Get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

As Linet (Amelia Shankley) explores the forest, she is being followed by a wolf. Not just any wolf — the big bad one or as this movie calls him, Dagger (Rocco Sisto). Luckily, she’s under the protection of Peter the Woodsman, who thinks she’s fearless. She’s actually just the kind of brave that has to be in the face of stupidity, because if you knew there was a killer wolf —  the kind that don’t scratch on no doors if we may use the poetry of one Glenn Danzig — in the woods you wouldn’t go there looking for fairies.

Linet has bigger problems. Her mother Lady Jeanne (Isabella Rossellini) is hiding in the woods because her husband Lord Percival has been replaced by his evil twin brother Lord Godfrey and oh man, they’re both Craig T. Nelson. It’s been seven years since Percival went to war and he’s legally dead, so Godfrey wants to get to know one of the stars of Tough Guys Don’t Dance biblically. He also wants to teach her daughter the meaning of fear by unleashing Dagger on her, who even eats her by the end of the film and they cut his stomach open and she’s alive inside and wow, this is a movie for children.

There’s also a song where the Wolf tells Linet that it’s good to talk to strangers.

Somehow, the guy — Adam Brooks — who wrote Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Practical Magic — directed this. It was written by Carole Lucia Satrina, whose credits include Cannon Movie Tales: Puss in Boots and three episodes of Tales from the Darkside, including “The Odds.”

The third American Ninja may not be everyone’s favorite, but I feel there are still some wonderful moments in it starting with the origin of new hero Sean Davidson (David Bradley) — Michael Dudikoff, the Joe Armstrong American Ninja we all known and love, was burnt out on martial arts and didn’t want to make a movie aroun South African apartheid — who as a child watched General Andreas (Cannon utility fielder Yehuda Effroni) kill his father and ended up being raised by Izumo (Calvin Jung) as a ninja.

His first mission brings him to the island of Triana and Kumite, err, another martial arts tournament, but this one has Sergeant Curtis Jackson (Steve James, baby!) and wacky Dexter (Evan J. Klisser) as the heroes and the minions of the Cobra (it takes a genius, no, it takes Cannon to put Marjoe Gortner in a kung fu movie), including his ninjette Chan Lee (Michele B. Chan), who has the power of a Maskatron action figure and can change out her face.

Taking a page from another leader named after a snake, The Cobra’s plan is very G.I. Joe. Whoever wins the tournament has to be the toughest person alive, so to prove to General Andreas that his new poison works, they will be injected with it. And die, one assumes.

Produced by real life scandal Harry Alan Towers — he allegedly ran a Soviet vice ring in the United Nations with Peter Lawford and his girlfriend Mariella Novotny and left the country when arrested and moved to Europe; he followed that up by being less sleazy and working with Jess Franco — and directed by Cedric Sundstrom — who also made the fourth movie in this series — this may feel like a step down to some. Writer Gary Conway starred on TVs Burke’s Law and Land of the Giants before writing movies, as well as being married to a Miss America.

In a 1994 interview in Masters of Kung Fu magazine, No Retreat, No Surrender star Kurt McKinney claimed that he was offered the lead role but didn’t want to be away from his new wife for too long.

You can watch this on Tubi.

To learn even more about this movie — and all the films in the series — grab Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume II.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon podcast about American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on May 31, 2022.

The final film between director J. Lee Thompson and Charles Bronson, Kinjitewas the ninth movie they made together and was going to be shot back to back with The Golem, a movie I wish had been made.

When reviewing the movie, the Los Angeles Times said, “If you think you might be offended by it, don’t go. You will be.”

While in Japan, a businessman had watched a woman be assaulted on the subway without complaint. And when he comes to Los Angeles, that moment continues to obsess him to the point that he attempts to recreate it and he learns that American women refuse to suffer in silence. Running from the scene of his attempted crime, he’s mugged and as others in the community learn of the crime and begins attacking men who resemble the businessman.

The woman who was involved is Rita Crowe (Amy Hathaway), the daughter of LAPD vice-squad detective Lt. Crowe (Bronson). And when he learns that the man that tried to hurt his daughter has just lost his own daughter to a child prostitution ring. Now he must get past his hate for the man and prejudice against the Japanese to do his job.

There’s not really a happy ending here — the girl is saved but the experiences she’s endured have ruined her to the point that she overdoses — and Bronson and his partner (Perry Lopez) go against their badges and attempt to murder the gang to stop them from ever doing what they did again.

Beyond the last film they did together, this was Bronson’s last Cannon movie — he would make Death Wish V with Golan — and Thompson’s final movie. It’s a dark movie in two careers where plenty of equally dark corners were explored ending with a man satisfied with finally finishing the job he set out to do.

Directed by Rusty Lemorande and Albert Pyun, this is a sequel — of sorts — to Cannon’s Alien from L.A., this film suffered as many late Cannon films did due to lowered budgets*. In fact, the pre-production work and storyboards were wasted as the final film bears little resemblance to the script. Lemorande — the producer of Yentl and Captain EO — originally started as the director and stopped when the film was about halfway completed. He claims that he only made eight minutes of this movie.

Actually, he posted a note on IMDB: “I’m the named director of the film. Only the approximately first 8 minutes of the film were written or directed by me. The remainder of the film is actually the sequel to Alien In LA which was tacked on and renamed Journey to the Center of the Earth in order to fulfill contractual commitments by the production company to foreign distributors. The remainder of the footage I shot (my film) has never been seen by the public (and few others) due to the lack of funds at the time to shoot and insert the many special effects shots required. The storyline of my version/script is entirely different from that in the above-titled film (the released version).”

Two years after the filming stopped, Pyun came on and this became a sequel, but he wasn’t happy with this movie either and doesn’t have his name on many of the re-releases.

Kathy Ireland plays Wanda Saknussemm, is back but the truth is, the footage in this comes from a canceled sequel to Alien from L.A. That may explain why there’s a whole different story with Crystina (Nicola Cowper) being in charge of rock star Billy Foul’s (Jeremy Crutchley) dog and some young kids taking the dog’s basket into a cave to discover a different world, which ends up being Atlantis using the sets from the first movie over again.

Somehow, Pyun made this movie with zero budget and somehow turned out something. I’m not saying that it’s good, but it is something. I wonder how Pyun got Emo Philips to even be in this.

*The budget is so low that George S. Clinton’s music from Avenging Force and American Ninja 2 gets used as the soundtrack.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I originally posted this article on October 31, 2019 but was reminded of this film when the new Arrow Video blu ray was released. It’s one of my favorite slashers, sadly one that was released too late to have many people care about it. 

The Arrow Video blu ray release of Hell High has a new 2K restoration from the original camera negative approved by cinematographer Steven Fierberg, a new audio commentary with director/producer/co-writer Douglas Grossman and cinematographer Steven Fierberg, archival audio commentary with director/producer/co-writer Douglas Grossman and an archival introduction and audio commentary with film critic Joe Bob Briggs. 

It also has new interviews with Grossman, Fierberg, Christopher Cousins, Maureen Mooney and composers Rich Macar and Christopher Hyams-Hart. Plus there’s a location tour, deleted scenes, alternate opening titles, trailers and TV spots, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Ralf Krause and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring liner notes by Michael Gingold, including an exclusive interview with stunt coordinator/actor Webster Whinery.

You can order this bu ray from MVD.

I love that Arrow kept the Joe Bob Briggs intro to the DVD release of this film, as he so perfectly explains why this is an amazingly original slasher that more people need to see.

I had no expectations of what this movie would be like when I discovered it on YouTube. I figured that it would be about a high school class menaced by some sort of slasher villain, but I had no way to prepare for the gritty and just plain weird film that I would be confronted with. This is an incredible feeling and why I keep writing this site, as I want to discover these experiences and share them with others.

Unlike the typical slasher, this film finds itself spending time with the victim — high-school science teacher Miss Brook Storm (Maureen Mooney), who is barely keeping it together after some repressed childhood trauma. It’s also about a former quarterback named Jon-Jon who grows sick of the game and his sinister teammates, so he falls in with the delinquents like Dickens, Queenie and Smiler.

Speaking of that childhood trauma, it starts the film. In a swamp, a man and a woman are making love when he decides to start beating her with a doll that belongs to a little girl. The little girl watches and grabs some mud, waiting for the two to leave the swamp. As they do, she throws it in the man’s eyes and he wrecks, sending the man and woman into poles which impale them as the little girl stares at the accident she’s caused. Yes — that’s Ms. Storm and this murder has now become an urban legend as some believe a swamp monster is the real cause of these two killings.

As Jon-Jon becomes part of this new gang, they decide to ruin the football game by driving on the field in the middle of a play and stealing the game ball. It might seem like this movie has become a teen sex comedy at this point, but don’t worry. Soon, it will stop meandering and get even stranger.

The gang now puts on Halloween masks and belts Ms. Storm’s home with swamp mud before the shenanigans turn into full-blown sexual assault. You’d think that Queenie, the lone girl in the gang, would be against this, but even she joins in, subverting the very slasher nature that you expect from this film.

This is a movie that I want more people to see. Please go out of you way — you don’t have to thanks to Arrow Video — to watch it.

I’m beyond happy that social media did not exist for Tim Burton’s Batman. Could you imagine how upset — more than letters columns, fans in comic book stores angry about the film and the 50,000 protest letters sent to Warner Brothers — they would be about Batman being played by comedic actor Michael Keaton? The guy who made Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure making Batman? Didn’t we come so far from the Adam West Batman which people still hated and had not reevaluated in 1989?

Producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan had purchased the film rights of Batman from DC Comics in 1979 and Uslan continued pushing the dark detective side of the character when every studio wanted camp.

This was almost made a decade earlier, as Tom Mankiewicz completed based on the comics by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, who was hired to do the concept art. It never happened — at one point, William Holden was going to play James Gordon, David Niven almost was Alfred Pennyworth and Peter O’Toole would have been the Penguin –despite Joe Dante and Ivan Reitman — who wanted Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy as the Dynamic Duo — getting involved.

At this point, Batman in the comics had become a grim and gritty force of crime-fighting vengeance. The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Killing Joke became critical successes and despite an Englehart script that got closer, it was Sam Hamm who would take the story and make it work.

It took another Burton success with Beetlejuice to get this movie greenlit. Yes, comics were not big business in 1989. Bob Kane, who always had his name listed as Batman’s creator despite Bill FInger probably doing all the work with none of the savvy to get the credit, endorsed the film in the face of disbelieving comic book fans.

With Keaton on board, the role of the Joker had plenty of potential actors attached, such as Tim Curry, Brad Dourif, Ray Liotta, James Woods, Robin Williams, David Bowie and John Lithgow. Burton wanted John Glover, which I would have loved. But the studio always wanted Jack Nicholson.

Comic book fans were happy with this casting. As for Nicholson, he reduced his $10 million fee to $6 million for a cut of the film’s earnings and merchandise, which ended up making him around $90 million dollars.

The third star of the film would be Gotham City itself, a place designed by Anton Furst, who Burton had wanted to work with since he saw The Company of Wolves. He would later say, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so naturally in tune with a director. Conceptually, spiritually, visually, or artistically. There was never any problem because we never fought over anything. Texture, attitude and feelings are what Burton is a master at.”

The city was based on Brazil and Blade Runner, as well as the idea that Gotham was — in the words of Furst — “what New York City might have become without a planning commission. A city run by crime, with a riot of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going.”

Before Batman‘s release in June of 1989, a whole new wave of Batmania took over with $750 million worth of merchandise sold. I can’t even explain to people not alive for that summer what it was like or the lines of people waiting to see this movie. It was incredible, levels of fandom not seen since Star Wars.

For once, in the face of so much hype, a movie delivered.

Gothan is on the edge of chaos, as always. Boss Grissom (a perfect Jack Palance) openly challenges the authority of the police and government. His associate Jack Napier (Nicholson) is making time with his best girl Alicia Hunt (Jerry Hall). And reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) and photojournalist Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) are investigating a human bat that has started destroying criminals.

Napier and Batman face off at Ace Chemicals and the mobster crashes into toxic chemicals, transforming body and soul into the Joker. He takes over the mobs of the city and declares war on Gotham and Batman, who of course is Bruce Wayne (Keaton) and who has fallen for Vale.

Sure, it’s simple in retrospect, but that’s because it’s become part of the fabric of our fandom. Even today I marvel at the fact that Prince did this soundtrack, that Nicholson got his buddy Tracy Walter into the role of Bob the Goon — who had his own action figure and we figured was a major new bad guy only to unceremoniously be killed off by his own boss — and that character actors like Michael Gough and Pat Hingle could so easily become who so many of us envision Alfred and Commissioner Gordon.

Batman changed culture. It’s why superhero movies were finally taken seriously, even if it took Marvel to finally cement that. It launched Batman the Animated Series, perhaps the greatest comic book adaption of all time, a show better than its source material. And according to Scott Mendelson, it led to an increased importance of opening weekend box office receipts, less time between movies playing in theaters and being released for home viewing which killed second-run theaters, big time merchandising tie-ins and PG-13 being the best possible rating for box office.

As for Melniker and Uslan, all their hard work really added up to nothing. Their 1992 case against Warner Brothers claimed they were “the victims of a sinister campaign of fraud and coercion that has cheated them out of continuing involvement in the production of Batman and its sequels. We were denied proper credits, and deprived of any financial rewards for our indispensable creative contribution to the success of Batman.” The films made $2 billion but the settlement offered by Warner Brothers to the production team was minuscule.

Batman is a film that holds up for me. It was released at a magical time, my final summer at home before college, seeing my love of comic books shared on a big screen surrounded by my brother and best friend. I can still imagine it as if it were yesterday, my brother endless repeating the Joker lines we’d seen in endless trailers and commercials until the lights went down. “Wait until they get a load of me.”

Fabrizio De Angelis — who directed, co-wrote with Dardano Sacchetti and produced this movie — was so sure of its success that he made the sequel immediately afterward. You know, De Angelis doesn’t get mentioned all that often when people bring up Italian sleaze merchants, but the guy made three Thunder movies and six Karate Warrior movies, so he knew how to replicate a successful formula. He also produced so much great junk, such as The Last Match, The Beyond, Cop Target, Emanuelle Around the World and so much more.

Kevin (Richard Anthony Crenna, son of Richard, providing his own wardrobe and also getting dysentery while making this), Jennifer (Ann Douglas), foxy Pam (Sherrie Rose, Summer Job),  Bob (John Harper) and Mark (Pietro Genuardi) are sailing down a river in Santo Domingo to report on the water’s radioactivity. What happens if that radioactivity also gets into a crocodile? You won’t have to wait forever to find out.

For a while, they’re guided by Conchita and her dog Candy, but when that mutated reptile rises and destroys her, instead of the local government led by Judge (Van Johnson) figuring it all out, they frame the youngsters for murder, as Judge and Foley (Wohrman Williams) are the reasons why the town is in this whole mess.

There’s also Joe (Ennio Girolami, Viking from Sinbad of the Seven Seas), a hunter who knows the truth and is the Robert Shaw to no one’s Roy Scheider. The real star of the whole show is the gator, who pops up repeatedly and wipes out man — and spoiler warning — canine alike, but Joe is also man enough to literally surf on the thing.

If Becca and I ever get out to the Amazon, after watching this, Cubby is staying home.

You can get both this movie and its sequel from Severin or watch Killer Crocodile on Tubi.

When Henry Jekyl was young, he caught his father cheating on his mother in the barn. Caught, he was beaten by his dad as the half nude woman laughed at him, forever intertwining sex with violence and repressed sadomasochistic longings.

Welcome to a totally different take on the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Many years later, Dr. Jekyll is experimenting with the human mind, but really he’s just mixing ether with cocaine, which drives him insane and transforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde. Actually, it goes even further than that because it turns him into Jack the Ripper, a killer of women of the night who look just like the woman his father slept with all those decades ago.

That mix of ether and cocaine also allows him to play master to prostitutes and their clients where they lose their inhibitions and end up murdering one another. Meanwhile, his wife Elisabeth (Glynis Barber) begins to suspect that perhaps her husband has something to do with all the Whitechapel murders.

Director Gérard Kikoïne also made the 1989 version of Buried Alive (with Ginger Lynn, Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence and John Carradine), Lady Libertine, the Cannon film Master of Dragonard Hill and Love Circles. It’s a strange movie, as the costumes and money seem to be modern, yet it’s set in the Victorian era. Perkins doesn’t make the full makeup transformation as most actors do, but goes wild in the way he carries himself, adding another different killer to his career of odd characters. It’s definitely not for everyone — it mixes huge doses of sex with violence, which always seems to upset people — but for those ready for its surreal take on Jack the Ripper and a classic horror novel, there are plenty of rewards to be had.

Leonard Maltin said that it was, “Tasteless, pointless, and unpleasant.” That’s a standing ovation where I come from.

The Arrow blu ray of Edge of Sanity has a new 2K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Arrow Films, as well as brand new audio commentary by writer David Flint and author and filmmaker Sean Hogan, interviews about the movie with Stephen Thrower and Dr. Clare Smith, author of Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture, features on director Gérard Kikoïne’s career and him discussing the film, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys and a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jon Towlson. You can order it from MVD.