Screenwriter Dana Olsen wrote a script called Life in the ‘Burbs that he based on his own childhood. Growing up, he learned that what seemed like a normal life from the outside revealed a world of psychotic people. He said, “As a kid, it was fascinating to think that Mr. Flanagan down the street could turn out to be Jack the Ripper. And where there’s fear, there’s comedy. So I approached The ‘Burbs as Ozzie and Harriet Meet Charles Manson.”

Once the film entered the hands of Joe Dante — who we’ve often written about as someone who deftly skews the American middle-class while planting his feet firmly within it — it got even crazier. He placed the entire film on the Universal Studios backlot and brought it stories he heard all the time of that one house in every neighborhood where you never see people leave, you see the lights on all night long and the grass never gets cut. It’s kind of like that Tom Waits tune — “What’s He Building?”

“What’s he building in there?

What the hell is he building in there?

He has subscriptions to those magazines.

He never waves when he goes by.

He’s hiding something from the rest of us.”

Mayfield Place is one of many identical neighborhoods inside Hinkley Hills, which is one of many identical neighborhoods in Iowa, which is one of so many identical states across the country. It’s also the name of the neighborhood from TV’s Leave It to Beaver, which was also shot on the same lot.

Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) has a week vacation, which is just enough time to learn that his new neighbor’s, the Klopeks, are at the best strange and at the worst a danger to every house on the block.

After all, that’s what Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun, Snik from Little Monsters) thinks. And so does military vet Lt. Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern!) who watch Hans Klopek (Courtney Gains, Malachai from Children of the Corn) use the family’s car to drive garbage a few feet to the curb. And that’s not all. Soon, the entire family is digging up their backyard with pick-axes in the middle of a torrential rainstorm.

Mark’s wife Bonnie (Dante favorite Wendy Schaal) finds another neighbor, the elderly Walter (Gale Gordon, long the TV sitcom enemy of Lucille Ball and you can see photos of the two of them together all over his house), missing and his dog running loose. All that’s left? His toupee.

Ray’s wife Carol (Carrie Fisher!) tires of this silliness and invites everyone over to the Klopeks. While everyone else meets Dr. Werner (Henry Gibson!) and Uncle Reuben (Brother Theodore!), Ray sneaks to the basement where he finds Walter’s toupee.

Hijinks ensue, as they must in any great movie. This is a film that you can come in on at any point and find something magical and hilarious. Are the Klopeks really killers? Has the entire neighborhood gone insane? Will Ray blow up their house? Just watch it!

Here’s some trivia that I love about this movie:

The structure used as the Peterson home was also used as the home of the character of the virgin Connie Swail in the Tom Hanks film Dragnet.

While they were editing the movie, Dante used Ennio Morricone’s “Se Sei Qualcuno è Colpa Mia” from My Name Is Nobody as the temporary track for the scene where Ray and Art walk up to the Klopeks’ house and ended up falling in love with it. It’s in the film instead of the Jerry Goldsmith score.

Walter’s toy poodle Queenie? That’s the same dog that played Precious in The Silence of the Lambs.

Corey Feldman and Michael Jackson were close friends during the filming and Bubbles the Chimp was a frequent set guest. Unfortunately, the celebrity monkey regularly defecated all over the place, so Dante had to ban him from the set. Yet dog poop was needed throughout the movie, so prop master Mark Jameson made an actor safe version from canned dog food and bean dip that he loaded into caulking guns.

The Klopeks house is filled with TV and movie references. One of the paintings is from Night Gallery. Their dog Landru is named for an alien overlord from Star Trek (or a French serial killer). The sled Rosebud from Citizen Kane is in their basement. But ironically, it isn’t their house that was from The Munsters. Feldman’s character Ricky Butler’s family lives there.

At one point, Ray studies a book called The Theory and Practice of Demonology. That book isn’t real. How do I know? Its author is Julian Karswell, the bad guy from The Curse of the Demon.

Much like every Joe Dante movie, Dick Miller shows up. Here, he’s Vic the garbage man.

Finally — on the subject of Brother Theodore — I first discovered him as a kid when he was a frequent guest on David Letterman’s early shows. These blasts of strangeness still amaze me. I’m shocked that they ever aired on a major network they’re so odd. And if you’re wondering where you’ve heard Theodore before, perhaps it’s in the trailer for Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery.

To get the best possible version of this movie, go for the blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Rospo Pallenberg, the director of this film, is probably better known for the movies that he collaborated on with John Boorman, like Exorcist II: The Heretic, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest. This is the one and only movie he ever directed and sadly, it’s mostly known for being one of Brad Pitt’s first roles.

Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch, son of Donovan, the man who sang about smoking bananas in “Mellow Yellow”) has just been released from a mental hospital after his father was killed suspiciously. He quickly falls in love with Paula (who can blame him, she’s played by Jill Schoelen from Popcorn), but she’s already dating the big jock in town, Dwight (Pitt, who met Schoelen on set and got engaged to her at the end of filming). For some reason, the school’s principal Mr. Dante (Roddy McDowell!) is also in love with her. Once we get that all settled, a bunch of murders start happening and any of Paula’s suitors could be the killer.

I mean, how can you not love a movie where Paula’s district attorney dad (Martin Mull!) gets shot by arrows and spends the entire movie stumbling around and trying to get rescued?

The kills in this movie are ridiculous: one teacher is killed on a Xerox machine and every kid gets a copy of it. Another is having way too good of a time on a trampoline before a flag gets put under it.

It all ends with Dwight’s head in a vice and Brian making him choose between the two men. Paula screams, “Stop fucking with my emotions!” and literally sends a claw hammer into his brains and slicing him in half with a circular saw.

Seriously, this movie is just weird. It has no set tone and usually, that’d make me hate things, but it works here. Also, if you like Wall of Voodoo, they and lead singer Andy Prieboy are all over the soundtrack.

Vinegar Syndrome re-released this film this year, giving this 1989 late era slasher some loving attention. Please reward their efforts and go buy it from them!

You have no idea how excited I was when this Americanized giallo showed up on Amazon Prime. It’s short on directorial finesse, but it’s packed with talent and weirdness. I also think I may have spent two or three hours in the Hollywood no-tell motel that shows up an hour into this one (my early 20’s were a little crazy, to be honest).

Karen Witter (Playboy Playmate of the Month in March 1982 and ex-wife of Two and a Half Men creator Peter Lorre) is Jo Anne, one of the ladies of Suite Nothings, a phone sex line. Yes, these things once existed in the 1980’s, a decade where a movie could be called 976-Evil and everyone knew what the storyline conceit was.

Ruth (Karen Black!) is in charge of them all, but when they start dying off one by one, the police have to get involved. Lt. Meyers (Tracey Walter, BOB THE FUCKING GOON from Batman) and McDonald (Silvana Gallardo, Rosasio the maid from Death Wish 2) start looking for the killer, who everything thinks is Bobo, a regular caller who finishes quickly and states that “no one can handle nipples better than Bobo.” One wonders if he is the notorious Howard Stern regular!

All manner of celebrities — well, to movie weirdos like me — show up: Divine out of drag as a detective, Tab Hunter, Geoffrey Lewis (Juliette’s dad!), Bud Cort and Paul Bartel (who was an executive producer, too)!

Here’s a weird bit of synchronicity: Karen Mayo-Chandler, who plays one of the telephone girls in this one, also appeared in the phone related horror films Party Line and 976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor. She was also the girlfriend of Jack Nicholson (and Tracey Walter was in nine movies with his buddy Jack, so one assumes that these things are all related).

Trust me — this isn’t a great or even good movie. But I was entertained. Then again, at 4 AM on a Saturday night, my standards are even lower than usual. But hey — you can watch this on Amazon Prime.

If you thought Joe D’Amato didn’t have a Jaws ripoff in him, then you don’t know Joe D’Amato. Or Federiko Slonisko. Or Michael Wotruba. Or David Hills. Or Kevin Mancuso. Or Joan Russell. Or Raf Donato, the name he used when he directed this.

Joe D’Amato had just as many names as he made movies. Born Aristide Massaccesi, he first became known as a cinematographer on films like What Have You Done to Solange? before directing his own films like Death Smiles on a Murderer, five Emanuelle films include the absolutely berserk Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Antropophagus, Absurd, Endgame and literally hundreds more, as well as producing films by George Eastman, Michele Soavi, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci and Claudio Fragrasso.

This movie begins as we meet four boys, Miki, John, Jason and Alan, eating hotdogs on the beach with a Native American mystic who tells them the tale of the monstrous Wakan shark. The boys sign a blood oath that they will always be friends and help one another in times of danger.

Much like a Stephen King movie, the boys get together ten years later. However, Wakan shows up, kills John and starts randomly devouring just about everyone in his path. There’s a long extended sequence where a police chopper hovers over the guys’ boat, repeatedly saying “Go back to shore, you should be embarrassed of what you’ve done” that made me laugh so hard I fell off my couch.

If the scene of the shark blowing up at the end — sorry spoiler warning — looks familiar, it’s because D’Amato just recycled the effect from the end of The Last Shark. Yes, the Italian film industry is not above ripping itself off. Also, the effects team only built a shark head. The rest of the undersea footage comes from National Geographic.

The mystic angle adds a different take on a shark movie. And there are moments of sheer absurdity, like the sheriff being named Cody and not Brody, harpoons being shot into the cars of punkers and a fishing scene where it’s obvious that no one knows how to actually fish.

Joe D’Amato may not have delivered the Italian shark movie of my dreams, where George Eastman emerges from the inside of the shark eating its innards, but dammit if he didn’t try.

You can get this from Severin, who used our quote on the back cover.

Straight up, let me be honest. This movie is crazy. I say that a lot in conversations about movies that defy description. I may exclaim, this movie is insane. It’s bonkers. I may use all manner of words. Let me tell you, when it comes to Christmas movies, nothing will prepare you for this.

Let me short hand it for you — imagine if Home Alone had more terror and blood. Think of the grindhouse version of that film. And then realize that this was made a year before and director René Manzor once threatened the makers of that film with a lawsuit alleging that they had remade his movie.

The difference is that when the Wet Bandits get beat up in Home Alone, the carnage is like a cartoon. Not here. Not at all.

Thomas de Frémont is a smart young kid who is obsessed with inventing things and American action movies like Rambo. He lives in a secluded mansion with his widowed mother Julie, his nearly blind grandfather Papy and his dog J.R. On Christmas Eve, Thomas uses a Minitel ( a French 80’s internet that had access to commercial and private addresses, along with chat rooms) to try and talk to Santa, only to be targeted by a deranged homeless man who breaks into the mansion.

Seriously, this evil Santa is super evil. He gets a job where Julie works, slaps around kids and gets his entry into their home by hiding in a delivery van and killing the driver. He then kills Thomas’ dog in front of his eyes. The young boy thinks that this really is Santa and he is angry that he’s stayed up so late to try and catch him dropping off toys.

The evil Saint Nick cuts off all the phone lines and challenges Thomas to a game of life and death, even catching him once and letting him go. I’m not going to give away more of the movie, but it’s seriously one of the darkest holiday movies I’ve ever witnessed, one that will make kids not want anything in heir stockings.

It’s also shot in an incredibly frenetic style that I’d compare favorably to Michele Soavi. Manzor would go on to be a famous writer, as well as get hired by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to direct some of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Also known as Deadly Games and Dial Code Santa Claus, this movie was impossible to find. That said — the awesome folks at American Genre Film Archive have a restored version playing across the country this holiday with a blu ray finally releasing soon. It won’t be out in time for Christmas, but if you’re already reading about it here, you know how to search the grey markets of the internet by now. It’s worth the time.

UPDATE: This is now on Shudder. Go watch it right now!

EVEN BETTER UPDATE: Vinegar Syndrome has released this movie after years of people like me waiting for it. Get it now!

A Roger Corman produced ripoff of The Abyss? I’m not sure that there’s anything that sounds worse. How bad is it? Two-time Academy Award winner Janusz Kamiński (those Oscars are for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan) worked on the movie for a few weeks before being removed because the stuff he filmed looked too good.

In the near future which is probably today, an undersea lab is trying to figure out new places to live, as the ozone layer is completely gone. Claire (Priscilla Barnes from TV’s Three’s Company) has found an unknown life form that gives her psychic visions. Nothing strange there. Nope. Not at all.

Then there are all these manta ray creatures that keep wiping out the crew and their subs. One of them even gets transformed into a jelly man. Or a gelatinous mass, but I like the phrase jelly man.

Commander Dobler (Bradford Dillman, who also shows up in Piranha and The Swarm, so obviously he is an enemy of nature) quarantines the ship and refuses to allow anyone to study the jellified crewman. This happens several times, as Claire undergoes several psychic visions. Can she and her boyfriend (played by Daryl Haney, who wrote Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood) save the day? Will Roger Corman show up in a cameo? Will the ending completely rip off The Abyss?

Probably the only interesting thing I can tell you about this movie is that the crew members are all named for New York Mets players.

You can watch this as part of the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix.

Michele Soavi directed four horror films from 1987 to 1994, starting with Stagefright and ending with Cemetary Man that continued the rich tradition of Italian horror. With training from Joe D’Amato and Dario Argento, as well as second unit work on two Terry Gilliam films, he emerged as a unique presence with an eye that combines those aforementioned traditions with a gaze toward the art film and the new.

Some considered this movie a sequel to the Demons series of films, with each movie all based around one cursed place. Demons was all about a movie theater (including Soavi as the Man in the Mask that lures people to their doom) and Demons 2 concerns an apartment building. There are also a million other movies that are and are not connected to that series that only Joe Bob Briggs can properly explain.

The film opens with the history of the church. Upon finding stigmata on the foot of a village girl, Teutonic Knights wipe out a village — man, woman, child and animal — burying them in a mass grave. It seems the devil had infiltrated the entire town and this was the only way to deal with it. One villager (Asia Argento) tries to escape and is impaled and tossed into the grave. The knights cover the grave with crosses and build a church upon it.

In modern times, we meet Lotte (Argento, again), the daughter of the church’s sacristan, Hermann; Evan, the new librarian who starts a relationship with Lisa (Barbara Cupisti, Stagefright, Cemetary Man), an artist restoring the artwork in the church; the bishop; the reverend (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, The Omen, City of the Living Dead, House on the Edge of the Park) and Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie, Nightbreed, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace).

The cathedral is filled with secret pathways that Lotte uses to go out clubbing, before coming back and getting slapped by her father for smelling like cigarettes and booze. There’s also a rumbling, bubbling undercurrent of pure evil presided over by black-robed monks.

Evan and Lisa may be sneaking off and making love, but he is only really in love with learning more of the church. As she finds his way to the stone with the seven eyes, he kneels before the status and tears his own heart out, holding it above his head as it beats its last, while we’re treated to fast-moving visuals of the pulsating city above the church set to the music of Philip Glass (The Church also features music by Keith Emerson and Goblin).

As the possession of Evan increases — yes, ripping out his own heart was just the start — we’re treated to a litany of insane images. Lisa is taken by a demonic goat. An elderly couple bickers and then the wife is found using her husband’s head to ring a church bell. A man kills himself with a jackhammer. A bridal party photo shoot ends with the bride model impaled. A woman is absolutely destroyed by a subway train. A giant flesh tower of dead bodies rises as the mechanics of the church kick in, trapping everyone there with death the only escape. Oh yeah — there’s also a flashback to the original builder of the church being impaled on his mechanical security system.

The Church is less about a narrative flow and more about a collection of images and moments that add up to one impressive smorgasbord. Soavi saw the other Demons films as “pizza schlock” and ended his artistic relationship with Argento with this film. Yet he was contending with a script that had a ton of other writers, including Argento, Soavi, Franco Ferrini, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti (who wrote nearly every major Fulci movie, as well as A Bay of Blood and Shock), Fabrizio Bava and Nick Alexander. What emerges is a wild exercise in style, featuring a multitude of references to artwork both religious and modern, including the painting “Vampire’s Kiss” by Boris Vallejo.

If you’re expecting a movie that’s easy to follow, I suggest you find another one to watch. But if you’re searching for arresting visuals and a technically proficient director who has a ton of visual tricks he wants to blow your mind with, then by all means, get ready to experience The Church.

When I was a very young child, my grandfather would come home from working night shift at the J&L Steel Mill and sit in front of the TV drinking Pabst and watching war movies. The entire house would be bathed in blue light and the sounds of machine gun fire. Forty some years later and here I am, doing the same thing. I’m not slaving away in the furnace, but I am writing a project for my real job while watching war movies. I’d like to think the films my grandpa watched were better than the junk I end up watching.

Yes, this is a movie where John Vernon and Mark Gregory somehow end up in the same frame. This blew my mind and made me wonder if I was on my death bed and my brain was attempting to calm me as my soul transitions to the next plane with the kind of Jacob’s Ladder scenario that I have heard so much about.

This time, Mark is playing Johnny Hondo, a special forces commando who never dresses in any form of camouflage whatsoever. I mean, the dude dresses all in black for daytime missions and all in white for night missions. He kills lots of people all over the world when he isn’t chillaxing on his Montana ranch. That’s where General Ross (Vernon) finds him and arranges for Johnny to meet his estranged and dying father.

It turns out that Johnny’s dad once drove a school bus filled with the Shah of Iran’s gold from that country to Afghanistan. With my poor US school system education, I never realized that that’s only a distance of around 800 miles. To get his father’s honor back, he has to complete the mission. And if you’ve seen any 1980’s post-Rambo films, you know that the system is corrupt and against our hero Johnny Hondo.

Luckily, Johnny has backup. There’s a plucky young Dondi-like child and his sister. The moment we meet her, we know that she has only been placed in this movie to die. And then there’s the mechanic who gets the war bus moving again. He’s played by Bobby Rhodes from Demons and Endgame, so he instantly becomes my favorite person in this movie. Literally, every line of his dialogue is profanity, much like talking to me in person.

This movie also has some of the most chipper 1980’s synth on its soundtrack, to the point that you forget that we’ve basically been waging war in Afghanistan since this one was made back in 1989.

This one’s directed by Pierluigi Ciriaci, who brought us pretty much all of the Mark Gregory war movies that we’ve covered this week. And much like every Italian movie made in the 1980’s, it was written by Dardano Sacchetti.

Much like the films that entertained my grandfather, this is filled with explosions, gunfire and plenty of people being riddled with bullets. Unlike the movies that he enjoyed, it also has a hero that has decided to wear a white turtleneck with a beige coat and drive a schoolbus into a warzone.

Want to experience all the action and bus driving for yourself? Then I recommend you head to Amazon Prime, a place where there is nothing but Mark Gregory films as far as the eye can see!