I wear yellow glasses, and when I have them on, terms like adult thriller and neo-noir appear as they should: giallo.

Back in 1948, Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson) is killed during a robbery, and her husband, Roman (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed this movie), is executed for the crime, but not before he whispers something to Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a reporter.

In 1991, private detective Mike Church (Branagh) is looking into the identity of a woman whom he names Grace (also Thompson), who has appeared– mute, amnesiac and with nightmares — at the orphanage that raised him. Mike asks his friend Pete Dugan (Wayne Knight) to publish her info in the paper, while hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) tries to use his skills to bring her mind back. She doesn’t, but does remember a lot about the lives of Margaret and Roman. And oh yeah — Franklyn is really Frankie, the son of Margaret and Roman’s housekeeper Inga (Hanna Schygulla), Grace is artist Amanda Sharp who paints scissor-themed photos and — man, is this an exposition dump? — Frankie killed Margaret with scissors when Roman rebuffed his mother’s love. The scissors were put in Roman’s hand, and that brings us to now, as Franklyn tries the same thing on Mike and Amanda.

Roger Ebert said that this was similar to the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, saying, “Dead Again is Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrating that he has a natural flair for bold theatrical gesture. If Henry V, the first film he directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, Dead Again will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock — and the Olivier of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I do not suggest Branagh is already as great a director as Welles and Hitchcock, although he has a good start in that direction. What I mean is that his spirit, his daring, is in the same league. He is not interested in making timid movies.”

But hey, that ending, where — spoilers — a scissor sculpture kills the killer? Ever seen Tenebre? That said, I do like the twist that Mike was actually Margaret and Grace was Roman.

A cat from outer space teams up with a young alien girl and her knight, along with a novelist named Wisely, to fight an alien that possesses people.

Sounds pretty simple, but from that description, you have no idea just how strange things can get. Based on Old Cat by Ni Kuang, this is like The Hidden with a cat. 

Wisely (Waise Lee) is a writer who comes into contact with a girl named Princess (Gloria Yip) and her cat, General (is this a Cat’s Eye reference?) and a knight named Errol (Lau Siu-ming). They’ve robbed an archaeological find called the Octagon, hoping to use it in their quest. As it is, Wisely is writing their story, even if he only knows them from afar. That soon changes as Wisley and his friend Li Tung (Lawrence Lau) help them battle the shape-shifting and possessing Star Killer.

This is berserk, filled with neon colors, goopy monsters, eyeball destruction, glittery cats, people set on fire and everything else you want from Hong Kong cinema. The scene where the cat battles a dog in a junkyard took six months to create. It’s just a few moments on screen.

If you like this Wisely story, check out The Seventh Curse, a perhaps even more deranged film. It shares the same director as this movie, Lam Ngai Kai. He also made The Ghost Snatchers, Erotic Ghost Story, and another of the oddest films ever made, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

The limited edition 88 Films Blu-ray features a rigid slipcase with new art by Sean Longmore, a 40-page book, a premium art card, audio commentary by Frank Djeng, an interview with Gordon Chan, and an image gallery. You can get it from MVD.

Joe D’Amato and Rosella Drudi reteamed for this sequel in name only to Eleven Days Eleven Nights, even though the character of Sarah comes back. Now she’s played by Kristine Rose and has been married and separated and given the new job of the executor of the estate of Lionel Durrington (James Jackson), one of her past lovers and the richest man in Louisiana.

Guess what? This is actually the third film in the series because Sarah was the lead character in Top Model, which is also listed in plenty of places as Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2. Look — it wouldn’t be Italian movies if it weren’t confusing.

There are four heirs and one after another, they all get with our heroine, who will determine which one is worthy of the money based on how good they are in bed, one supposes. Sonny is the only one with no interest in Sarah, even when she danced for him at a strip club, but that’s because his last girlfriend was abused in front of him by friend of the family Alfred, who is also trying to get the money.

Because Italian films really don’t care about how insane or twisted — actually, this is what they run toward, not from — things get, Sarah disguises herself as Sonny’s old lover and goes to the impotence institute and gets a rise out of him.

By the end, she realizes that no one deserves the money, so she comes up with a plan. She’ll write a book about the family and its secrets while they split the $500 million with a mystery person. They quickly sign and yeah, the mystery guy is the man who was supposed to be dead and we have a happy ending. We also have Laura Gemser in the blink and you’ll miss it role of Sarah’s jogging publisher and Ruth Collins from Lurkers, Doom Asylum and Prime Evil show up.

For a movie about people getting naked, D’Amato has plenty of women in sweaters show up. I’m all for this.

Also: This has also been listed as The Web of Desire and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights Part 4 because Italian movies are wonderful and confusing.

88 Films has released this in an incredible slipcase with art by Sean Longmore. It also has a booklet with notes by Calum Waddel and Rachael Nisbet. Inside, you’ll find a new 4K remaster from the original negatives, audio commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti, interviews with Mark Thompson Ashworth, Piero Montanari and  Pierpaolo De Sanctis, and Italian opening and closing titles. You can get this on 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Puppet Master III was on USA Up All Night on May 24, 1996.

Directed by David DeCoteau and written by Charles Band, C. Courtney Joyner and David Schmoeller, Puppet Master III is not a sequel but instead a prequel, starring Guy Rolfe as the creator of the many puppets that we’ve come to know, love and maybe be afraid of, the legendary Andre Toulon.

When the story begins, Toulon and his wife, Elsa (Sarah Douglas), are performing puppet shows for children, incorporating anti-Third Reich messaging, such as when Six-Shooter attacks a Führer puppet. A German scientist named Dr. Hess (David Abercrombie) wants to create a formula for living puppets, while Major Kraus (Richard Lynch) wants to arrest him for treason. To prevent this, he takes him and his puppets, Tunneler and Pinhead. He also kills Elsa right after Toulon gives her a puppet with her likeness. That puppet becomes the Leech Woman, and we also get to see another creation named the Jester.

Hess isn’t horrible. He bonds with Toulon, who explains that each puppet was someone he knew and loved. Their strong will to live after death kept them residing within each of their creations. This is also the origin of Blade, who may be the most popular of the puppets.

I hate that the new movies make the puppets become Nazis instead of killing them. Let’s get back to the idea of this movie because it works so much better.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Child’s Play 3 was on USA Up All Night on October 31, 1997.

Written by the returning Don Mancini and directed by Jack Bender, whose career has primarily been on TV, but he also directed The Midnight Hour, so he brings a horror perspective. Child’s Play 3 would be the last Chucky movie Mancini would be involved in until Bride of Chucky.

Eight years after the events of the last movie, the Good Guys factory is reopened, and it’s reopened near-immediately — why do they keep opening this place? — the blood of Chucky gets on a new doll, the CEO gets killed and Andy (now played by Justin Whalen) is tracked down at Kent Military School, as he has had so many foster families ruined by his PTSD from Chucky that he has to be drafted into this place. By the end, Chucky turns the place into a real warzone, trying to possess a young kid named Tyler (Jeremy Sylvers), slicing throats and throwing grenades.

This movie was made under pressure, as it was greenlit before Child’s Play 2 was even released and was in theaters nine months after that film. It also only made $20.5 million on a $13 million budget, ending the franchise for seven years.

In a replay of the video nasties era, Child’s Play 3 was part of a tabloid panic in Great Britain, where journalists claimed the film had influenced two 10-year-old boys in their murder of two-year-old James Bulger. It was later determined that neither had actually seen this movie. Additionally, sixteen-year-old Suzanne Capper of Manchester was kidnapped and tortured by former friends for several days, then set on fire and left to die. She was forced to listen to the song “Hi, I’m Chucky (Wanna Play?)” by 150 Volts while being abused, and one of her abusers, Bernadette McNeilly, started each torture session with the phrase “Chucky’s coming to play.” As you can imagine, tabloids also had a field day with this story, blaming it on the movies when that song was in heavy rotation at the time. Child’s Play 3 was the movie they claimed was responsible for all of this.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bikini Summer was on USA Up All Night on September 26, 1992; March 19 and August 7, 1993; May 20 and June 3, 1994. 

Chester Marley (David Millbern) is supposed to paint the beach house of Mr. and Mrs. Patterson (W. Dean Grey and Katherine Victor, who played Batwoman in The Wild World of Batwoman, Car-Driver Spider Woman in Mesa of Lost Women, and Sheila Frankenstein von Helsing in Frankenstein Island (before working in animation), while they’re on vacation. Instead, he and his friends Richard (Alex Smith), Jazz (Shelley Michelle, Julia Roberts’ body double in Pretty Woman), Mad Dog (Kent Lipham) and Cheryl (Melinda Armstrong) transform it into a party house.

Director Robert Veze came from porn, and it shows. This does not shy away from breasts unless you watched it on USA Up All Night. He wrote it with Nick Stone, who also wrote Sunset Strip. Strange enough, this has a lot of environmental concerns in it, as well as wanting to save a beach, but mostly, you know, tits.

There are three of these films. You can download them from the Internet Archive.