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.

A Brazilian-Japanese criminal plays yakuza gangs against each other, but bites off much more than he can chew. Inspired by a story that director Kazuhiro Kiuchi read about a Taiwanese gangster going to Japan to escape arrest, this is the story of Carlos (Takenaka Naoto), who finds himself in the middle of a gang war between the Yamashiro and Harakawa families.

As the old man of the Yamashiro gang (Minoru Oki) tries to find his successor, he finds that everyone he wanted for the job is dead. It may have been Hayakawa (Yuzo Hayakawa), whom Katayama (Ryuji Katagiri) wants dead, so he can be first in line. And then there’s Sato (Goichi Yamada), who has brought in an American monster of a hitman (Chuck Wilson) to do his dirty work.

Blood, guns and neon are the order of the day. Ah, V-Cinema. Short, sweet and full of violence!

Carlos 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, an interview with director Kazuhiro Kiuchi and a video essay by critic and Japanese cinema expert Jonathan Clements. You can get this from MVD.

After doing a jail bid for embezzlement, Kiriko (Yuko Natori) leads a quiet life, driving a cab overnight. The problem is that someone is stalking her in a gigantic Land Cruiser. Yes, it’s Duel, but in a Japan that is falling to pieces and in the middle of an economic collapse.

Directed and written by Shunichi Nagasaki, this is a V-Cinema movie committed to keeping your eyes on the screen. There’s never time to get bored and Kiriko, despite her checkered past, is a heroine who you can get behind. Every man in her life is horrible and when that gigantic truck keeps coming near — Nagasaki was inspired by the story of a female taxi driver who told him during a ride just how dangerous her job is — it’s thrilling.

Is the driver someone she hurt before? Or has man’s inhumanity to man kept that from even being possible? Maybe someone just like to frighten women. You’ll find out.

Stranger 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 an interview with director Shunichi Nagasaki. You can get this from MVD.

Somewhere after the end of the world, somewhere in France, Calpet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), the landlord, murders and slices up his victims to sell as meat to his hungry tenants. A clown named Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers the latest help wanted ad that brings in bodies, but he’s such a good worker that no one wants to kill him. He’s also fallen in love with Calpet’s daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac).

She loves him so much that to save him, she works with the Troglodistes, vegetarian underground soldiers who are trying to make the world safe and maybe a little less cannibalistic. Instead of Louison, they rescue Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard), who, like every tenant, wants the clown to die so that they can stay well-fed.

The directors would go on to make City of Lost Children together, and Jeunet also directed Amélie and Alien Resurrection. When the Troglodistes initially appear in this, he claims it is his tribute to the original Alien and how the xenomorph is revealed.

Presented in the U.S. by Terry Gilliam, this film feels like something exists to be discovered in every frame. It’s childlike while also frightening in what it depicts. And Jess Franco vet Howard Vernon is in it!

I’m so glad to have this new Severin release. I’d never seen anything like it before, and now I want to watch each moment again and again.

The Severin 4K UHD and Blu-Ray release of Delicatessan includes a commentary by co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, an interview with Jeunet and co-director Marc Caro, a making-of, an interview with Terry Gilliam, a trailer, interviews with nearly everyone in the cast and crew, a short by the directors called Le Bunker De La Dernière Rafale, Jean-Pierre Jeunet archives and an exclusive book by Claire Donner of The Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies. You can get it from Severin.

Joseph Prince (Colin Firth) somehow scores the beyond-beautiful Cynthia (Lisa Zane), a bad girl who might seem out of the league of a park ranger/artist. On the night of their honeymoon, she disappears. He spends days, months, and years looking for her while being laughed at by his best friend Elijah (Billy Zane, and yes, he and Lisa are sisters; consider then the Ivan and Rada Rassimov of this kind of sort of Giallo) makes fun of him.

This leads him to the big city, where he tries to locate her by pictures of her tattoo—nearly getting murdered by Danny Trejo—and meets another of her past loves, Jenny Purge (Lisa Blount), a woman with whom she made BDSM art films. Oh, Joseph, you barely knew this woman and kept getting shocked that she ran drugs and had a girlfriend. And is that the Log Lady as a nun? Sure is.

There’s also a scene where Joseph goes to see Parasite, The Head Hunter and The Evil Below in the theater, which I want from my erotic thrillers.

Directed by Andre R. Guttfreund (who won an Oscar for short In the Region of Ice and primarily worked in TV, directing episodes of Knots Landing) and written by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, who would later write The Net and Catwoman, this is the dumbest of the dumb movies, and for that, I loved it. It wants to be neo-noir or Giallo or something, yet it has a scene where Mr. Darcy and Machete discuss what a succubus is. Where else will you get that movie drug?

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Fatal Instinct — the most “we’ve got that erotic thriller at home” title ever — this movie was directed by John Dirlam (a camera op on Silk Stalkings, which had to prepare him for this, as well as the cinematographer of The Vineyard and If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!!) and written by George Putnam, who also wrote Unlawful Entry.

Cliff Burden is a detective looking into the death of a developer. He falls in love with the top suspect, Catherine Merrims (Laura Johnson), just as you’d expect in a film noir. Or an erotic thriller. Except all the sex happens offscreen, so…why would you have Ashlyn Gere in your cast and do that to your audience?

The plot does not matter at all. In the meantime, Madsen wanders around this big, fancy apartment building and tries to keep this rich woman away from the law while being the law. There’s no reason why someone killed the developer, and that murder does not mean anything. Yes, this is just a movie of hanging out, tough guy dialogue and lovely cinematography, which was Dirlam doing double duty.

Is there neon? Is there a saxophone soundtrack? Then, yes, this is an erotic thriller because there’s a sexy tennis scene along the way. It’s not the Skinemax you’re looking for, but hey, this is from a time when Michael Madsen was the selling point for direct-to-video detective films.

Indian-American director Jag Mundhra was born into a conservative family where films were discouraged. He was a good enough engineering student to earn his master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan but switched to a PhD program in filmmaking.

While his early and later movies were socially conscious, he’s probably best known for his erotic thrillers—he directed Night Eyes, so he can claim to be influential—such as Legal Tender and Tales of The Kama Sutra: The Perfumed Garden and horror movies like Hack-O-Lantern.

More than twenty years ago, Cindy watched as real estate agent Jason Laurence (Matt Roe, Puppet Master) threw her mother to her death. And wow, her mother was an exploitation actress, with a poster in her house that seems to be created from Vampire Circus.

Shannon Tweed’s character, Cindy, embarks on a revenge scheme that begins with involving Paul (William Katt) in a check-cashing crime caper. This involvement transforms Paul from a young idealistic businessman into a cynical crook. The question arises: if you had the chance to aid 1991 Shannon Tweed, much less bed her, wouldn’t you?

Throw in a solid supporting cast—Joseph Campanella, Stella Stevens, Karen Elise Baldwin—and plenty of saxophone, shake it up and add way better cinematography by James Mathers (Night Eyes 3, Syngenor, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5), and you get a movie that shows that the origins of the erotic thriller genre weren’t always quickly made tossable efforts.

What takes this beyond the norm is the scene where Tweed does a striptease wearing a black lace bodysuit, contorts in front of a yarn spiderweb, and stabbing a teddy bear while screaming, “Mommy!” That may have just been words on the page of Steven Iyama’s script, but Tweed transforms a simple turn of phrase into a memorable set piece that helps this transcend normalcy.

You can watch this on Tubi.