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.

Lucy (Rosanna Arquette) and Monte (David Bowie) work at Dali, a super trendy NYC nightspot. They’re both in debt, underpaid and dealing with all sorts of weirdness in their lives when they make up their minds to join up with lingerie designer Viv (Eszter Balint) and rob their workplace. But they’d have to be good at being criminals to pull that off. They are nowhere near even OK.

Also released as The Incident,  Houdini and Company, The Robbery and Shag-O-Rama, this has some strange folks in it. Even the protagonist, Lucy, wants to be Houdini. Plus, the cast has several intriguing actors like Buck Henry, Marlene Matlin, Vivica Lindfors, Maura Tierney, Andre Gregory, Kathy Kinney and James Avery. Even Iman and Julian Lennon are in this.

There’s nothing really like it, so to get a better version of this after years of assembly cuts and producers’ versions is pretty cool.

Extras include an introduction by director Richard Shepard; commentary with Shepard, actors Rosanna Arquette and Eszter Balint, co-producer Sarah Jackson and co-screenwriter Tamar Brott, moderated by Cereal at Midnight host Heath Holland; commentary by Director Richard Shepard; a making-of; a photo gallery with commentary by Richard Shepard; director and theatrical cuts; a 2024 trailer; the original trailer; a limited edition slipcase and booklet with essays from film historian Graham Rinaldi and director Richard Shepard. You can order this film from MVD.

Ken and Joji (Aizawa Shō and Shishido Jō) have been hired to investigate a robbery as well as kill a cop named Sakai. Doing so will test their friendship in this film from director and writer Yasuharu Hasebe (Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss, Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701 Grudge Song).

With a non-linear narrative and older and younger hired killers paired together years before Pulp Fiction, this tells the story of two men who will kill anyone in their way before one of them is obsessed with a photo found in the hands of one of his victims. This leads to one of those noir “don’t ask what you don’t want to know” narratives, as everyone they meet is untrustworthy at best and murderous at worst. Crime doesn’t pay, except here, it ends up that way, even if it’s not for everyone.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka and a video essay by critic and Japanese cinema expert James Balmont. You can get this from MVD.

Takanishi (Hideki Saijo) just watched his lover Reiki get killed in a Yakuza crossfire. Instead of just letting it pass, he’s in a V-Cinema movie, which means that he’s going to kill everyone who did him wrong. And because this was directed by Teruo Ishii (The Executioner, Shogun’s Joy Of Torture, Horrors of Malformed Men), that means that revenge is going to be so bloody that you won’t believe it — like a garbage truck chasing down Yakuza until they’re smashed into gore.

This was the first movie the director made in 12 years. He was seemingly ready to go wild.

There’s also catgirl thief Minako Fujimoto, love hotel queen Kimiko Yo, plenty of bad guys to shoot and an ending that’s just guns and naked women in still photos, making you wish that Teruo Ishii made this even longer.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka, a video essay by Japanese cinema expert Frankie Balboa and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.

I’ve written at length about the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, as they’re some of my favorite movies ever—Beast Stable is one of the best things the human race has made—so I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing a direct-to-video reimagining of the first movie.

Man, I was wrong.

Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) is — was? — the Scorpion, an unkillable prisoner who did more than get revenge. She is the patron saint of wronged women throughout Japanese prisons, a whispered name that is worshipped and feared.

This begins with an unnamed woman (Natsuki Okamoto) being trapped in hardening concrete before the barrel she’s in falls off a truck, freeing her, before she’s trained by the yakuza to be an assassin, sent to prison and let loose in the catacombs below the cells — the same place Scorpion was in all the way back in Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 — and murder Scorpion to gain revenge for the warden, who lost his eye to the legendary lady’s sharpened spoon.

But can you kill an idea? Or better yet, can you become one? The systems that keep women in prison, that ruin lives, they want Scorpion dead for sure because she inspires people. When the unnamed heroine finds Scorpion, she’s long gone, walled into concrete, but she is holding her spoon as if she died fighting. Except that her hand opens, releasing the spoon into our new heroine’s hand before disappearing. Now, Scorpion is reborn, but more to the point, she can never die.

Directed and written by Toshiharu Ikeda (Mermaid Legend,  Sex Hunter), this movie is about as perfect as a down-and-dirty, low-budget VHS tape can be. How amazing is it that it’s in a perfect Arrow box set, cleaned up and still ready to destroy your brains? I couldn’t love a movie more.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka, a video essay by film historian Samm Deighan and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.

Directed by Yôichi Sai, who wrote it with Wui-Sin Chong, this has a gang of criminals trying to steal a few million dollars from American marines in Okinawa. Seiji Matano plays the leader of these rugged and rough crooks, a long-haired, brooding bad guy who remains in control of every situation while being as cool as possible.

There’s also a jazzy soundtrack that I enjoyed and Okinawa looks beautiful.

While this is longer than most V-Cinema and perhaps not as quickly violent as others, it’s not bad. As usual with criminal films, the gang itself may doom the situation before the USMC or cops catch them.

Burning Dog is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka, a video essay by critic and Japanese cinema expert Mark Schilling and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.