How weird is it when Bill Maher shows up in a movie and you don’t expect it? Like his roles in D.C. Cab or Pizza Man? Or when he shows up in the party scenes of Ratboy and House II?  But would you ever expect him to play the Indiana Jones of a jungle adventure movie?

The government is worried that our nation’s avocado supply is low — spoiler warning, this has happened several times, including once when I nearly got to make a post-apocalyptic Commerical for Wholly Guacamole before the price increases of avocado attacked that company’s fortunes — because of the Piranha cannibal women who live in the mysterious avocado jungles of San Bernardino. Well, they don’t eat women. They only eat men. So the powers that be send Professor Margo Hunt (Shannon Tweed), jungle guide Jim (Maher) and Bunny, an undergraduate student.

Along the way, they meet the men who serve the Piranhas — known as the Donnahews* — and learn that the last professor who went into the jungle — Dr. Kurtz (Adrienne Barbeau) — has gone feral and become the queen of the cannibals. This makes the second female society movie this week that Ms. Barbeau features in as the leader of women while also the first where her name is a Joseph Conrad joke. At least she got to kidnap Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Burial of the Rats.

There’s also another tribe of cannibal women, the Barracuda Women, and their main argument with the Avocado Women is over what condiment — clam dip or guacamole — goes best with male flesh.

Director J. F. Lawton would go on to write Pretty Woman, Under Siege, Blankman and create the Pam Anderson series V.I.P. Oh yeah, he also wrote the video game adaption Dead or Alive, the only one of those movies to feature a cast that includes Eric Roberts and Kevin Nash, who should definitely make a buddy cop movie together.

It’s pretty astounding that a movie that should totally be a softcore junk movie can somehow be an exploration of feminism while making fun of Cannibal Holocaust and have a character named after Conrad collaborator Ford Maddox Ford. It’s also a movie that dares to feature Shannon Tweed as a feminist professor and theorizes that there are light and dark sides to feminism, as if it is The Force.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*In 1989, this joke would have made sense, as it refers to Phil Donahue, whose feminist-slanted TV show really pushed that men should become more emotional. It wouldn’t be funny, but at least it would have made more sense.

Directed by Andrea Bianchi (Burial Ground, Strip Nude for Your Killer) under the supervision of Lucio Fulci, this is all about the filming of the movie Dirty Blood, which has been infiltrated by an actual killer.

It starts off quick, with a trucker axe chopping a woman’s hand off and blood spraying everywhere. And if you’re saying, “That’s in Cat in the Brain…” so are many of the effects from this movie.

To make Dirty Blood as realistic as possible, everyone involved is called in for a seance from Madame Ullrich, but when she tries to reach her spirit guide, she only encounters evil, which comes in the form of an earthquake that knocks everyone around*. Oh yeah — and Jennifer, the lead in the movie, has a cop boyfriend who has been hunting down the killer we saw in the beginning.

Exactly how much Fulci had to do with this movie is debatable. What isn’t is that this was Bianchi’s last horror film. From here on out, he’d concentrate on adult films, mostly using the name Andrew White, including the trans triangle film Mystifying Revelation and other movies starring Cicciolina and Rocco Siffredi. He even made Fleshy Doll, one of the very adult films I can think of inspired by Oscar Wilde.

The gore is fun**, but all in all, I’d much rather see the movie they were shooting in this than the movie they actually made. Look, someday a high-end blu ray label is going to do a box set of all these presented by Fulci films and try to convince you that they have something special about them. They really don’t, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t enjoyable for lovers of bottom of the barrel and Italian genre cinema, which come to think of it, is often the same thing.

*It also takes the form of non-stop Fulci zooms, spinning cameras and the medium appearing as if she has two gigantic golf balls in her mouth. It’s a completely ludicrous and awesome scene that made me actually come around on this movie. The earthquake is so strong that it pops the cork off a bottle of champagne!

**Seriously, a girl gets murdered and left behind on a merry-go-round and the psychic woman gets impaled on a cemetery fence right through the crotch of her Macy’s slacks Cannibal Holocaust style.

You can watch this on YouTube or get the DVD from Revok.

Don’t Be Afraid of Aunt Martha is the translation of this title, which makes me wonder, in a week where I also watched Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things and Marta, is the name cursed?

Also known as Murder Secret, this Mario Bianchi written and directed movie had one of those presented by Lucio Fulci* titles on it. Bianchi also directed Satan’s Baby Doll under the name Alan W. Cools and Kill The Poker Player as Frank Bronston. Later, he’d move into adult** under the aliases Martin White, Nicholas Moore, David Bird and Tony Wanker. To add to that, he also wrote the well-regarded giallo The Weapon, The Hour and The Motive.

One of six movies that Fulci edited — cannibalized, I guess — for Cat in the Brain***, this is closer to slasher than giallo and only really comes alive when the bloody murders kick in, which is really why you hire Fulci, I guess.

Richard Hamilton (Gabriele Tinti****, Emanuelle in America, Endgame) gets a letter from Aunt Martha (Sacha Darwin, Voices from Beyond), who he has not seen in decades and who his family has written off as dangerously psychotic. So he does what you and I would by bringing his enire family —Georgia (Jessica Moore, D’Amato’s Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and its sequel), Charles, Maurice and Nora, his wife — to visit Martha at her estate.

The only person they find there is her caretaker Thomas (Maurice Poli, Five Dolls for an August Moon), who seems kindly but you know, this is an Italian gore movie, so no one is all that nice. The murders begin pretty much immediately.

Betraying the other films that Bianchi made, the nude shower scene goes on forever and is even stranger because although the daughter is an adult, she acts like she is 15. She’s somehow luckier than the youngest child, who runs directly into a chainsaw, and at that point, I thought to myself, “Well, now I can’t give this a bad review.”

The end of this movie is complete fake-out junk and therefore is wonderful. Also, big points for somehow getting Tinti to slowly kiss the maggot spewing corpse of his long dead aunt before getting into a slapfight with Poli.

You can watch this on YouTube.

*He also helped Fulci with the horrible Sodoma’s Ghost.

**In 2001, he released John Holmes vs. Ilona Staller, which is stranger because it has Ron Jeremy in it, plus it was released 13 years after Holmes’ death and didn’t use Staller’s more famous Cicciolina name.

***The other films are Bloody Psycho, Hansel e Gretel, Massacre, Sodoma’s Ghost and Touch of Death.

****The rare four asterisk footnote is just for me to tell you that even thought Tinti has passed on, I still am jealous that he was married to Laura Gemser.

You know, I don’t think anyone watches a Shohei Imamura movie to have a good time. This is a really rough one, explaining how Japan dealt with the aftermath of two nuclear bombs dropped on their country and how the hibakusha* — people who were marked and sickened by the blasts — were dealt with.

The hibakusha faced discrimination when it came to prospects of marriage or work, as most people did not know what the consequences of radiation sickness would be, with many believing it to be hereditary or even highly contagious. As a result, even their children were discriminated against.

Based on the book by Masuji Ibuse, the title refers to the literal black rain that fell on Japan in the days after the two blasts, as firestorm-generated, soot-filled rain with high concentrations of fission products and carbon-14 came down on the survivors.

Honestly, when I first started watching this, I was convinced that it was a movie from the 1950’s. That’s how perfectly the era is captured, as we meet Shizuma Shigematsu and hear and see his journal entries about the differences between Hiroshima in 1945 and five years later.

There’s a harrowing moment in the opening as Shigematsu wanders the streets and sees first-hand the damaged people wandering the streets, seeking cool puddles of water to die in. Their skin is literally falling from their bones and one asks, “Do you not recognize me?”

By 1950, some normalcy has returned for people who weren’t in the blast. Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko become the guardians for their niece Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka, who was in the pop group The Candies and appeared in Godzilla vs. Biollante; she sadly died of breast cancer at the age of 55. She won the Best Actress Award at the 14th Hochi Film Award for this movie).

As time goes on, so many of their friends and family die from radiation sickness and Yasuko’s prospects for marriage become more unlikely. In the end,  she forms a bond with the poor artist Yuichi, who has been so damaged that he sees cars as American tanks.

This film pretty much swept the 1990 Japanese Academy Awards, winning Best Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Lighting, Best Music Score, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. All of these are well-deserved, as this is a stunning movie that will stick with you forever.

The cast worked hard for these awards, as they were forbidden by Imamura to leave location, as he didn’t want them to have a break from the oppressiveness of the past and begin to enjoy the comforts of modern Tokyo before the film was complete.

In America, we were always taught that the Japanese would never surrender and we had to do this. That may be an easy thought if you haven’t had to watch burned babies as ash in a mother’s arms. This is a brutal, uncompromising movie that even goes further, showing how a struggle for things to get better can exist side by side with a worry that this could all happen again.

You can find Black Rain on the new Survivor Ballads: Three Films By Shohei Imamura set from Arrow Films, which is available from MVD.

*Believe it or not, there were also nijū hibakusha. That name refers to the 165 people who survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Consider this a Japanese version of The Haunting while remembering that the movie may not be revolutionary, but the video game — which was released at the very same time — certainly was*.

That game’s creator, Tokuro Fujiwara, toured the film’s set to gather inspiration for the game. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse) gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted with the game, which laid the groundwork for survival horror games like Resident Evil.

In the film — and video game — a small film crew visits the abandoned mansion of artist Ichirō Mamiya in the hopes of finding several paintings he left behind and restoring them. However, minutes after they walk in the front door, poltergeist activity erupts.

Soon, the ghost of the artist’s wife, Lady Mamiya, has possessed one of them. It’s soon revealed that she and the artist lost a child after he fell into the house’s incinerator. She then began killing children to give the ghost of her child playmates before committing suicide. Now, she haunts the home, unless the crew can figure out how to help her pass into the next world.

Neither the game nor the movie were ever released in the U.S., but thanks to the internet, you can experience both.

*In an era when video game adaptions had little or nothing to do with the movies they had the license for, Sweet Home actually expands on the story of the movie.

Here’s a drink.

Lady Mamiya

• 4 oz. lychee nectar
• 2 oz. vodka
• 2 oz. pineapple juice
• 2 oz. cranberry juice

1. Add all ingredients to an ice-filled glass.
2. Stir and enjoy.