Tara Buckman blasted me into puberty when she showed up in the Lamborghini with Adrienna Beabeau in Cannonball Run and for that we should always remember and thank her. Well, maybe not totally into puberty — I was nine — but I finally understood why guys in movies were going crazy for women.

Frem memorably playing the mother who gets her throat slit in Silent Night, Deadly Night to roles in Hooper, Xtro II: The Second Encounter and showing up in D’Amato’s Blue Angel Cafe and the unforgettable Night Killer, Ms. Buckman has won me over.

In High Finance Woman — a title so ridiculous that I often drive around yelling it at people just to get their reaction — she plays Brenda Baxter, a successful broken who sleeps with people to get insider trading information. People like Albert (Louie Elias, the older brother of James Stacy, which means he was the ex-brother-in-law of both Connie Stevens and Kim Darby; he also had a scar on his chin from a fight scene gone awry on Spartacus when Kirk Douglas drowned him a soup cauldron), her rich man who is the only mentor she’s ever had.

Then she meets Alex (Charlie Edwards, whose only other role is in Hitcher in the Dark and God bless Filmirage), a poor journalist hired to write a story about her career. They fall in love, she reveals to him that she’s basically a high-priced escort for her clients, they break up, she starts dating Albert, Alex proposes, she breaks it off with Albert and then finds out that — surprise! — he’s the father of the man she’s engaged to, so Albert pays her off to never see her son again.

Then Albert dies and his mistress gets all the money. And that would be…Brenda, which means that she may never end up with Alex until his new job sends him to interview another high finance woman who is…yes, Brenda. Oh what a tangled web we weave, Joe D’Amato.

As with all 1990s Joe movies, Laura Gemser makes a cameo and yes, she’s a prostitute. But hey — free trip to America, right?

Look, some day Vinegar Syndrome is going to re-release all of these D’Amato movies for $40 in a cool slipcase in the proper aspect ratio and people are going to be losing their brains over getting them. Get in on the basement floor now, find them online and just have some fun. They’re not great, but they have great synth sax, incredible overacting and amazing posters. What else do you want?

Starting her career as a dancer in the Beastie Boys’ video for “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” Ruth Collins has been in so many touchpoints in my movie-watching life. There are Psychos in Love, Firehouse, Doom Asylum and appearances in three Robert Findlay movies, Lurkers, Blood Sisters and Prime Evil. It just stands to reason that she’d be in not just one but two Joe D’Amato movies — this one and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2.

in Any Time, Any Play, she’s a nightclub singer named Kelly whose ex comes back to work at the club, which means that she decides to sleep with anyone and everyone — hmm, Any Time, Any Play — until they get back together, which upsets the mob bosses that really run the place.

Shot around the same time as Passion’s Flower in the same area — and even sets — as the first Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, this one suffers by comparison. Laura Gemser does show up in a cameo as a saleswoman and as always breaks my heart.

Otherwise, this is one of the 90s D’Amato movies that only lunatics like me need see.

The Laughing Dead is the kind of movie that you need to make a commitment to.

Not long. Like 35 minutes or so, so that you get through the slow stuff like meeting everyone on the vacation bus tour and discover who they are, but trust me, it’s worth it because before all that long, a disgraced priest has done an exorcism that opens the world of the Aztec demons and we’re playing a game with a severed head and brains are being smashed by buses and somehow a kaiju battle ensues.

Yeah, The Laughing Dead has the movie drugs you’re looking for, you just have to act cool and chill for a bit and once everyone straight and boring leaves, we’re all going to get really, really messed up.

Thai born filmmaker Somtow Sucharitkul directed, wrote, produced, scored and acted in this Category 3 film transported by Mexico and man, what a United Nations of wonderment this all is. He also wrote Burial of the Rats, which has this same strange energy.

The humor may fall flat, the plot may not make any sense, but you’re here for wild things. This movie will deliver those. You just need to forgive some things.

You can buy this from Vinegar Syndrome.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally reviewed this movie on October 12, 2019. Now that Blue Underground has released a UHD and blu ray set, we thought it’d be a good time to write about it again. We’ve taken the original article and added some nuance, as well as info on how to order.

This set comes with both Ultra HD Blu-ray (2160p) and HD Blu-ray (1080p) Widescreen 1.85:1 feature presentations, as well as audio commentary by William Lustig and filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, who has a Maniac Cop series in development with HBO. You also get a making-of feature, a deleted scene, a gallery, a Cinefamily Q&A with Lustig, the isolated music track and trailers. 

You can order Maniac Cop 2 from MVD.

Bill Lustig and Larry Cohen return to tell the next adventure of Maniac Cop Matthew Cordell, who somehow survived being skewered with a pole and a dunk in the rivers of New York City last time. Now, he’s got a junked out police car and is patrolling the city and killing past enemies like officers Jack Forrest and Theresa Mallory (Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon).

Officer Susan Riley (Claudia Christian, Calendar Girl Murders) is now on the case of not only the Maniac Cop, but a killer named Steven Turkell (Leo Rossi, Bud from Halloween II) who has joined forces with the titular character. Turns out that for some reason, the Maniac Cop wants an entire army of criminals on his side. Look for Clarence Williams III from Mod Squad as one of those crooks named Joseph T. Blum.

Detective Lieutenant Sean McKinney (Robert Davi!) is also trying to stop the Maniac Cop, even promising him an honorable burial and exoneration for his crimes. For what it’s worth, our antagonist gets to kill the three inmates who scarred him and then takes our Turkell in a fiery explosion.

Of course, the credits roll with Maniac Cop’s hand bursting out of his coffin. You can’t keep a bad cop down.

Also appearing: Charles Napier, James Earl Jones, Danny Trejo and Hank Garrett, who once wrestled as The Minnesota Farmboy before going into comedy and appearing as Officer Nicholson on Car 54, Where Are You?

Sadly, Joe Spinell was to play Turkell the murderer, which would have united Maniac Cop with Maniac. However, Spinell died before filming began and the film is dedicated to him.

Although top billed in the credits and on the posters, Bruce Campbell is killed 17 minutes into the movie and has about 3 minutes of screen time. He also hates when people bring this movie up, as it reminds him of a painful time in his life. He always fires back — in a hilarious way — on hecklers who don’t follow this rule at conventions, which has led to goofballs purposefully asking queries about it just to get roasted by him.

Some think that because this is one of the better of the “Lucio Fulci presenta” films that The Godfather of Gore had something to do with it, perhaps co-directing alongside Giovanni Simonelli, who wrote Cat in the Brain for Fulci, as well as Jungle Raiders, The Ark of the Sun God, Bloody Psycho (another Fulci presents), some of the Kommissar X movies, a few Sartana films and a movie Bava came in to save, Knives of the Avenger.

Massimiliano and Silvia Cipollone play Hansel and Gretel, who we meet as they’re being kidnapped, then placed on an operating table where their organs are harvested because this is an Italian movie, then confirming that yes, this is an Italian horror film by having them come back as ghosts that horrifically pick off everyone involves one by one.

The kids kill everyone in their path by just showing up, their eyes glowing and then the madness happens. It would almost be a murderdrone if it were in more capable directing hands — or less, maybe — and it has the same song repeating five times as an instrumental and thirteen times by the kids.

This is the counterpoint, I guess, to The Sweet House of Horrors, where children need protected by ghosts. Here, the kids just cut out the middle man and lead people to growing, self-inflicted gunshots and oven-related death, as well as one old lady getting her eye damaged, just so we know who is really in charge here.

Along with the aforementioned Bloody Psycho, Cat in the Brain has effects and kills from this movie and several other late period movies that took advantage of Lucio’s signature, such as Sodoma’s Ghost, Massacre, The Murder Secret and Touch of Death.

After a drug deal gone wrong, the criminals take a magician named Chandu and his daughter hostage and take them back to his mansion, a place where his obsession with the gods of the ancient times has gone a bit out of his control and now, well, everyone is going to pay.

Sure, its a good set up, but it’s also directed by the man who brought us Pieces and Slugs, Juan Piquer Simón.

So anyways, Chandu lost his wife — his first assistant — due to an accident, which is when we’re to assume he got into the black magic that has left him with a pulsating left hand. Now his daughter (wife and daughter are both played by Marcie Layton) is his assistant and just in time for all hell to break loose.

There isn’t the budget to make this the movie it wants to be, but when has that ever stopped us from enjoying something?

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

I mean, how could I not watch this movie? It’s got Michael Dudikoff, Mark Hamill and Robert Mitchum improbably together in a riff on The Hitcher or The Vanishing or any other number of hitchhiking maniacs on the road movies.

Dudikoff is a cop who is more married to his job than to his Russian wife Lara, who finally decides to drive off and then make the decision to pick up Justin Mckay (Hamill), who grew up with a mother who parted her sister’s hair with a butcher knife and has passed on the willingness to kill to her son.

Over one brutal evening, Lara must ride with the killer as he destroys everyone he can, ending with him trying to convince Mitchum, playing a doctor, to give her electoshock therapy against her will.

If you’re used to seeing Dudikoff be a ninja — an American Ninja — he barely fights in this. But hey — it’s a Cannon Film, which means that it has some level of strangeness, maybe because it was shot in Italy* instead of America, but has stuntman Bob Bralver directing it, who only made one other full-length movie, Rush Week, which isn’t all that bad. He’s joined by writer Russell V. Manzatt, who also wrote that aforementioned college stalk and slash.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*That’s the claim I keep reading, even if IMDB says that it was made in California. I mean, with all the neons and blue color, this could have been a late Italian direct to video movie.

Directed by Sally Mattison and written by Catherine Cyran — all of the Slumber Party Massacre movies have been directed by women — this movie is probably the worst of the three films and a remake.

It does have a character named The Beach Weirdo that somehow has a power drill that he carries around and uses to do what killers in the slumber party movies do, which is drill women.

After filming was completed, the set was used for another Roger Corman-produced sequel that was also unrelated to the movie that before: Sorority House Massacre II. Speaking of Corman, this movie needed his special touch, because even though the actresses in the film were hired because they woud get nude, several refused and Mattison agreed to let them keep their clothes on.

The sinister foreign buyers demanded to see some flesh and Maria Ford was the one to get her clothes ripped off and assaulted, no matter what Mattison wanted to have happen. Man, how has Corman never been part of the Me Too takedown?  Hopefully he’s treated his talent better than what I’ve read.