Directed by Joseph Merhi — oh man, that dude is my new obsession — and writer Stephen Smoke (who also wrote Street Crimes, Living to Die and Magic Kid), Final Impact is the very definition of tickling you with a feather.

See that shirtless Lorenzo Lamas playing kickboxing champion Nick Taylor? Well, Nick is a drunken mess who never recovered from losing his title and his wife to Jake Gerard (Jeff Langton, who often did stunts in movies like Cobra and Road House).

Speaking of his wife Roxy, that’s Mimi Lesseos who I just want to watch do dropkicks and pro wrestling moves in real fight situations instead of just being insulted by a drunken Nick.

So the real story of the movie is Danny Davis (Michael Worth), a young kickboxer from Ohio that has aways idolized Nick, whose life — remember? — is horrible despite having Maggie (Kathleen Kinmont, Kelly Meeker herself!) loving him no matter how horribly he treats her.

A Vegas kickboxing championship is the goal for the whole movie, but then Nick gets the idea that he can still beat Jake, who beats him to the point that he dies in a hospital bed and yeah, you realize that you rented this for Lorenzo Lamas and now he’s dead and having Danny beat Jake is kind of anticlimatic especialy when you realize that he’s probably going to end up horizontally dancing with his hero’s common law widow, but direct to video films are wild and you just roll with the punches. Or kicks.

Also: the best karate fighters in the world are all white. Sure, whatever you say.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When his family is murdered, Johnny (Erik Estrada) gets revenge on the ones who did it — his former biker gang The Slaves and the corrupt cops who lied and claimed Johnny sold out the gang.

So why would I watch this?

Mimi Lesseos.

As Feather, she starts this movie wearing a yellow bikini and strutting down Venice Beach with a boom box to deliver drugs from the aforementioned dirty cops to the biker gang inside a psychic bookstore, who all try and assault her because this is a biker exploitation movie, which goes one further by having her start throwing dropkicks in a street fight and taking the drugs and the cash before saying, “You guys wanted to get fucked? Well, you just did.”

Well, the Slavers need to make this right, so they break into the cop’s house and kill everyone — including Feather, so boo, I’m out of this now — and Johnny decides he needs to leave town until the heat dies down, working in the garage of his friend Hammer (William Smith!) and falling for Anna (Kathrin Lautner), who is taking her daughter Samantha across the country to also start a new life.

Everything is as nice as marrying an ex-con biker on the run in Las Vegas can be until the cops — led by Davis (Armando Silvestre, who was in a ton of awesome Mexican films) come back and shoot up their trailer home, killing both Anna and Samantha, so Johnny and Hammer set the whole thing — loved ones inside — on fire and watch it burn.

Johnny then kills every single Slaver and when we get to the final confrontation with their leader Rico (Angelo Tiffe) and once that guy finds out Johnny is innocent, all is forgiven. Really? What?!?

It ends with this dialogue:

Johnny: Here are my colors, Rico. Burn ’em. And piss on the ashes.

Rico: Stay in the wind, Johnny. In the wind.

I really need to dig deep into the films of PM Entertainment because this movie is wild.

There’s also a long scene where Mimi pro wrestles a dude in the backyard that feels very much like apartment wrestling in Sports Review Wrestling or The Wrestler. There’s also a Greek chorus provided by a Vixen-esque girl group called The Sheilas who comment on the action throughout, including a montage where Estrada throws cops off roofs and sets wrongdoers ablaze, accompanied by flute solos. And the guy Larkin in this movie is played by Gary Groomes, who was pretty much blacklisted from Hollywood after playing Dan Aykroyd in Wired.

Syria-born director Joseph Merhi owned a chain of pizzerias in Las Vegas before directing video store junk — in the best of ways — like L.A. Crackdown, L.A. Heat, L.A. Vice, L.A. Crackdown 2, L.A. Heat the TV series and Midnight Warrior. He co-wrote the script with Ray Garmond and Addison Randall, who wrote some movies I’ll definitely be tracking down like Shotgun, East L.A. Warriors, L.A. Wars and Da Vinci’s War.

Man, L.A. was on fire in the 80s and 90s.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Winterbeast is less of a movie and more of a film that feels like it came from another much darker version of our universe, like a VHS tape that was found in a store and someone played it and it was too much for them and it killed them, then the police found it and it caused a few of them to lose their faith in God and they’re all in a sanitarium somewhere writing all over their faces, then the government got involved and one guy snuck the tape out but his son accidentally returned it to a mom and pop rental shop that rented it out so many times that they started making bootleg copies to keep up with the demand and here we are.

Sergeant Whitman (Tim R. Morgan) and Forest Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) have just spent the first ten minutes of this movie talking about all the mutilated bodies around the Wild Goose Lodge. Instead of the plot, this is where you’ll start to wonder why Whitman talks so close to everyone. In nearly every scene, nearly every time he talks, he’s within kissing distance of every person he speaks to, a moment topped only when three characters stand shoulder to shoulder, the camera gives a little dutch angle, they all look to the horizon and speak one at a time in a way that can’t be a conversation.

Someone has opened the Native American gate to hell — not to be confused with the traditional Italian gate to hell — and our heroes have to figure out how to put it back together. Standing in their way is Dave Sheldon (Bob Harlow), the owner of the lodge, who is given to red and plaid suits and screaming like a New England skinnier clone of Harvey Fierstein. Then, he goes wild in a scene that really I fear I don’t have the words for, slapping dead women in the face, shoving his digits into their neck wounds, dancing to strange otherworldly music and caressing other dead bodies he’s arranged around the room. It’s a big leap from someone who has been the Mayor Larry Vaughn character up until now to wildly doing some kind of vogue-like dance to “Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be.”

It took six years, three video formats and ten grand to make this movie or so they say. I don’t think Winterbeast was made. I think it escaped. I can’t explain a movie that has multiple monsters that don’t match — demonic humans, stop motion things out of The Gate, a gigantic chicken that nearly devours Stillman, a murderous totem pole covered in skeletal bodies, a skull bursts out of a man’s chest for no reason, Sheldon wearing a mask and dancing — as well as moments where the camera lingers forever on a chicken coop or someone driving while synth just drones away.

There’s also a moment when the investigation of the box of Native American medicine man Charlie Perkins (Charlie Majka) finds not just a monster tooth, but also a dildo and not a single person mentions it.

Director and writer Christopher Thies made one movie and this is it and it’s so much more than enough. Does he have too much creativity or audacity? And how dare someone name a movie Winterbeast and it takes place in the autumn? Why would you do that? How is there so much plaid in one movie?

You know Evil Dead straight up ripped off Equinox and everyone is too polite to say something about it? This movie gets the stop motion part of those films and then says, “What if we just had a man’s head burst into flames for no reason at all?” Also, there’s a theory that the totem pole and Indian skull were ripped off from Dokken’s “Burning Like a Flame” video, which makes way too much sense.

Nothing in this movie matches. It never seems to end as in every ending there is a new beginning, which feels like a painted sign that someone puts up on their wall as if they have any idea what it means. I can come to you and say that I have no idea what Winterbeast means but also that I loved every single second of it.

It also has music by Michael Perilstein, who scored The Deadly Spawn.

Vinegar Syndrome released this on their Home Grown Horrors Volume One box set along with Fatal Exam and Beyond Dream’s Door, two movies that also push your mind into places it is not ready for.

Based on the novel by Georges Simenon, Betty is, well, about Betty (Marie Trintignant), a young alcoholic woman whose affairs cause her to be removed from her family and not allowed to see her two children. One night in a bar, she meets Laure (Stéphane Audran), who takes her in, gives her a luxury hotel room and the opportunity to tell her story within a series of flashbacks.

The last film that director Claude Chabrol and his former spouse Stéphane Audran (Audran was also married to the father of her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant) made together, it features a character deprived of the love of her husband, used as a womb to create children for a rich family and left to only feel through alcohol and sex. But behind her eyes and those bangs, is she trouble for anyone she comes into contact with?

Is this a realistic story of life? A horror movie without the supernatural? A formless movie with no plot instigated within a 1960s conversation between Simenon and Chabrol? All of those things and more? Watch and see.

Arrow Video’s Lies And Deceit: Five Films By Claude Chabrol collected five high definitions (1080p) blu ray versions of Cop Au Vin and Inspector Lavardin to Madame Bovary, Betty and Torment. Each movie has an introduction by film scholar Joël Magny and select scene commentaries by Chabrol. Additionally, there’s an 80-page collector’s booklet of new writing by film critics Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Philip Kemp and Sam Wigley, trailers and image galleries for each movie and limited edition packaging with newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella.

Betty has new commentary by critic Kat Ellinger, as well as Betty, from Simenon to Chabrol, a new visual essay by French Cinema historian Ginette Vincendeau and a new interview with Ros Schwartz, the English translator of the Georges Simenon novel on which this movie is based.

You can order this set from MVD.

The Dark Brothers were proud to say that porn was dead and they were here to change it.

They were purveyors of fine filth, as they also claimed.

And they made — well, Gregory Dark — made movies that are fascinatingly unerotic, movies that the mainstream adult industry didn’t understand, that predate the gonzo and internet era, that had the kind of fashion and art direction that wasn’t dated or a soap opera or a parody of a known movie.

And as for Gregory Dark, his life was one of constant reinvention, from earning his MFA from Stanford University, then doing graduate studies in film at New York University, then making a documentary on the adult industry that led to him immersing himself in it, while finding that he could reinvent himself into a whole new person, half of the Dark Brothers, a somehow even darker form of the already shady world of pornography.

Then he realized that there was a market for erotic thrillers that could be sold to video and cable, made for a more female audience, one that nearly always features strong women and feels like giallo, but instead of murder being the driving force, it’s always lovemaking, but incredibly unrealistic, fog-ridden, neon-drenched, sax-blaring sex that challenges the Jacuzzi in Showgirls for gymnastic horizontal dancing. Everyone has a perfect body and a perfect life, but everyone is miserable. Indeed, Dark told The Rialto Report that no one had a happy ending in these movies.

Dark was also counseled by a father figure who was a psyops psychological warfare expert and had a teacher who gave him a voice in his head so critical that he fought himself with every project. So when his adult films were so different that they changed the industry like soap bubbles inside a syringe full of heroin — seriously, listen to that interview The Rialto Report did — slowly but surely making the look, the feel and the madness of his scenes commonplace.

So where would Gregory Dark take mainstream?

Ironically, his films seem to feel like Michael Ninn, who would seem to be the exact opposite of his adult films. He mentioned that he’d consider how Ninn would compose shots and shoot the female form and that comes through in his softcore work.

The story is one as old as Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Emmanuelle. A housewife is bored and strays, but then learns that once she’s become an escort, her fantasy life doesn’t live up to what she’d hoped it would be. That’s simple. What isn’t is the style Dark shows in each scene and yeah, there’s little to no plot, but everyone looks fabulous, like the kind of drawings of humans we’d send to space so aliens would know just how proud we are of our bodies. Between Dalia Sheppard, Michele Brin, Vidal’s daughter Catya Sassoon, Monique Parent, Kelly Royce and Alison Armitage, this movie feels like a Patrick Nagel portrait come to life.

If Andy Sidaris presented us with the light side of free-spirited and innocent sex appeal, of course Gregory Dark must be his reverse. As women sit on lounges combing their hair and relaxing before another love scene, everyone looks absolutely stunning, so ideal that they even wear their high heels to bed but never sleep.

Bonus points for the non-stop voyeur aspect, including a nun that is watching the watching in a continuing motif, and for using Billy Drago as a non-villain character.

David Cole (Maxwell Caulfield) is a cop with married to Joanna (Shannon Whirry), who is frustrated by their sex life, which threatens to end their marriage. Then she finds out that he likes to watch and wants to watch her, so everything seems to go well. But this is an erotic thriller directed by Gregory Dark, so you know that things are going to go wrong.

Based on a real Florida — always Florida — case in which a cop and his wife taped her outcall dalliances with other men for money, this is at once an example of the male gaze and female empowerment through said male gaze, as Joanna finds herself getting exactly what she wants and her husband learns that maybe he just likes looking instead of actually doing anything.

Dark gets his best cast maybe ever — mainstream cast, that is — in this one, with Jan-Michael Vincent, David Carradine, John Saxon and U.S. Olympic athlete Mitch Gaylord (yes, the lead of American Tiger).

This movie casts Carradine as a strip club owner who gets the Coles to help him blackmail Jan-Michael and when the press gets wise, John Saxon, as their lawyer, has a defense that claims that Mrs. Cole became obsessed with carnal crimes because of a prescription drug side effect.

Yes, it’s completely stupid. But how many Cinemax late night movies have you made?

I mean, yes, we have seen this before. A woman changes identities with her identical twin sister, finally getting to sip from the fountain of the fantasies she’s kept hidden in her vanilla marriage, but if I’ve learned one thing from a week of Gregory Dark mainstream movies, it’s that dream life has a dark grey lining under every silver cloud.

Directed under the name Alexander Gregory Hippolyte, somehow this movie brings along Kenickie and J. Peterman into the world of Dark, a place usually occupied by Delia Sheppard (who plays both twins), Dominique Simone, Kelly Royce and Julie Strain, who somehow has the sheer level of universal appeal that allows her to straddle — seductively straddle at that — the light side of the softcore force that is Andy Sidaris and the darkest of the dark that is Gregory Dark.

Where Sidaris presents a world that only exists in Dallas, New Orleans, Hawaii or Savage Beach, places dominated by jacuzzis, men who can’t shoot and the occasional remote controlled weapon interrupting synth-driven touching, Dark’s world is one where the forbidden fruit bites back, where getting to live the filthy life of your darkest dreams ends up decimating your vanilla white picket fence life, but along the way you get silky lingerie, gorgeous framing and, yes, lots of saxophone. I’ve been discussing the usage of saxophone in these movies all week and the only person who loved sex and sax more was probably Lucio Fulci, who showed us just how a woman can really enjoy one in The Devil’s Honey.

Look, I know the internet has all the dirty filth you want, but why is no one making movies like this any more? I mean, a bunch of hacks ape giallo and everyone loses their mind over it and people add some neon and synth and everybody thinks they’re Carpenter. Be brave and try to make one of these movies. Maybe they don’t make them like this any more. And sadly, Julie Strain is gone and while I want her to find the eternal rest she deserves, I wouldn’t be sad to discover that she’s become a sexy ghost.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can check out an alternate viewpoint from R.D Francis in this article.

This movie is so not from our reality and that makes me love it so much. Imagine a world in which Nick West (Martin Hewitt) can put on a nightly radio show where he gets multiple female callers to have phone sex with him. And he’s very not so great at it, other than having a gravelly voice, but they instantly become jelly on the phone lines, telling him how horrible their husbands are and why only he truly understands them.

Then one night, Honey (Tracy Tweed, sister of Shannon) gets through to Nick, who decides to dial Radio Moscow with her live on the air while people listen because obviously, the FCC does not prosecute for obscenity in the world of Night Rhythems.

Nick ends up taking it to Honey so hard — there’s some choking — that they both pass out but she doesn’t wake up. She’s dead and several very horny women basically heard Nick kill her on the air with his lovemaking. Even he isn’t sure what happened.

The one person who can help Nick is Cinnamon (Deborah Driggs, the one-time wife of American Rickshaw star Mitch Gaylord), an ex-dancer that understands the world that Honey came from, a place where the criminal Vincent (David Carradine) controls the ladies on and off the stage of his club. The cops are on his trail, mainly Jackson, played by Sam J. Jones, but Nick also keeps scoring with the ladies, like Jamie “The Brat” Summers, Julie Strain, Kelly Royce, Kristine Rose (who is in Joe D’Amato’s Passion’s Flower and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2), Tamara Longly and Alicyn Sterling.

You may figure out the twist early, which is fine, because obviously, it’s Bridget (Delia Sheppard) as the person trying to go from being Nick’s producer to taking over the show. What is a shock is that Wally Pfister, who has been the cinematographer for Christopher Nolan’s films (as well as Amityville: A New Generation and several more movies for Dark).

It all adds up now. Every frame is filled with smoke, sax solos, neon and the need to make the kind of love that only exists in movies, where no one gets a sprain or kneels on someone’s hair or looks anything less than their absolute sexiest.

Gregory Dark knows what he’s doing. This is probably one of his better efforts, at least mainstream.