God bless the Barbarian Brothers, Peter and David Paul, and God bless John Paragon, who worked on not just one but two of their movies (he wrote and directed Twin Sitters but only directed this). Here’s, he’s working from a script by Jeffrey Kerns, based on a story by Charles Osburn and Kurt Wimmer, who made the absolutely berserk movies Equilibrium, Ultraviolet and the Children of the Corn remake that came out in 2020 that nobody realized ever came out (he also wrote Salt, the Point Break remake, The Thomas Crowne Affair remake, Sphere and Law Abiding Citizen).

Peter Jade earns his living as a crook. David Jade is a Los Angeles cop. After the thief of a brother finds the key to opening a safe filled with diamonds, he gets targeted by criminal supervillain Philip Chamberlain (Roddy McDowall!).

The brothers are very Tango and Cash in this, as David wears jeans and Peter wears the finest of suits. Can they get it together and solve the mystery (and avenge the death of David’s partner?)?

The supporting cast in this is worth the price of admission. There’s Star Trek‘s James Doohan as Chief O’Brien. David Carradine as Mr. C, Peter’s prison burglar mentor. Billy Mumy of Lost in Space and “Fish Heads” fame as an assassin. Troy Donahue as a corrupt politician. And lots of other familiar faces like Tim Stack (Son of a Beach), Lewis Arquette (the father of that famous family), Steve Kanaly (Ray Krebbs!), Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne!) and video girl Bobbie Brown in a quick role as Peter’s girlfriend.

I have a major soft spot for the Barbarian Brothers. This movie moves quickly, offers plenty of harmless laughs and is kind of like empty calories. It’s not their best movie — I mean, it’s The Barbarians, hands down — but it’s still worth a view.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Anthony Hickox made both Waxwork movies, so that qualified him to take on the third trip to visit the Cenobites, which was necessary as the two films that had already come out were huge rental successes.

Series creator Clive Barker reprised his role as executive producer, though he was largely uninvolved until post-production, while Tony Randel at least contributed the story.

At the end of the last film, as Pinhead tried to reclaim his humanity, he finds himself split into his demonic form and as the limbo-trapped British Army Captain Elliot Spencer. As for Pinhead, he and the Lament Configuration remain within the Pillar of Souls that appeared as the last movie finished.

The pillar is bought as art by a club owner and when one of his sexual conquests is dragged into it and absorbed, Pinhead emerges and demands more blood. Without the influence of Spencer, Pinhead has become true evil and is using our reality for his own pleasure, which is against the regimented laws that the Cenobites live by.

Ashley Laurence returns for a cameo, as her Kirsty character explains the events of the previous films. And hey — Armored Saint plays the club!

Between the Barbie and CD Cenobites and the more American locale, this film suffers in comparison to the first two movies. That said, when viewed against what was to come, it ends up being pretty decent. The idea that Pinhead lost his faith in humanity after war rings true even many decades later.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Somehow, someway Joe D’Amato got Margaux Hemingway, Apollonia (yes, the female star of Purple Rain) and Dan McVicar (The Bold and the Beautiful) in one of his movies, had the budget to shoot in New Orleans and responded by delivering a film that has less sleaze than normal but still doesn’t skimp on the nudity that this movie promised to rental and cable viewers.

Ellen Foster (Hemingway) has watched her husband commit a murder and goes on the run. He sends a hitman after her in the guise of a journalist with whom she has a Mardi Gras affair with but of course, things are not as they seem.

If you spent your small Friday hours watching Cinemax or Showtime in the 90s, you know exactly the kind of movie that you’re getting into. That’s not a bad thing, as making these kind of movies was something that D’Amato could — and often did, seemingly — in his sleep. This time, he just has a more expensive cast.

Also the most attractive woman on the set — apologies to the lovely Ms. Hemmingway and Ms. Kotero — was Laura Gemser, off camera and designing the costumes that were just cast to the floo during the sex scenes.

This would be the last non-adult film that Joe D’Amato would direct. But if he’s going out, he’s bringing along some old friends like Cinzia Monreale (who was in his Buio Omega), Maurice Poli (Papaya dei Cairibi) and Donald O’Brien (Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Immagini di un convento).

It’s shot in Austria, which may explain the Teutonic decorated dorm room. I don’t know. I do know that O’Brien is a handyman accused of putting Monreale (who many will recognize as the blind Emily from The Beyond) into a coma and the rich kids that get away with it while also making his death look like a suicide. So she brings him back from the dead an hour in and everyone dies.

It’s sad to be honest. It feels like Patrick more than Frankenstein and maybe it’s for the best that D’Amato went off into the world of adult. But he also made The Crawlers on the way out and I’d rather think of that as his last movie.

Damon Santostefano did the Fangoria videos Fright Show and both Scream Greats before a career that would see him make Three to Tango and Bring It On Again.

But man, this movie is something.

Harrison Harrison (Billy Morrissette) is a scientist who loses his arm in a regeneration experiment that leads to the limb becoming a reptilian force of evil, but he’s also a mother’s boy — his mom Helena is played by Elke Sommer! — and she has him and Doctor Hans Vaughan (Oliver Reed) wrapped around her finger, so our protagonist visits the homeless church led by Preacher (Johnny Legend) and recruits amputee veteran Stripes (Garrett Morris) and an army of the homeless.

Yeah, we already reviewed this once before, but this is all part of our plot to get you to watch it. Look, the link if even down there waiting for you.

It’s kind of like a comedy version of the Lizard from the Spider-Man comics and it doesn’t all work but when it does, it does. And that’s more than most movies can claim these days. It also has plenty of absolutely bonkers effects and I’m certain Morris thought, “How come every movie I’m in seems to have body horror in it?”

You can watch this on YouTube.

The last movie Lucio Fulci would direct, this came about when The Godfather of Gore — at the time, less in a stately role and he was a man suffering from physical, mental and financial trauma — was approached by Aristide Massaccesi (one of the many names for the man we usually call Joe D’Amato*) who read the short story “Porte del nulla” that Fulci had written. It was his idea to make it into a movie, to head to New Orleans and to bring his daughter Camilla with him as his assistant.

When Fulci got there, none of the equipment worked.

Another sign that this is a D’Amato production? Laura Gemser was the costume designer!

When attending the funeral of his father, Melvin Devereux (John Savage, The Deer Hunter, Hair) meets an enigmatic and gorgeous woman who knows him even if he doesn’t know her. She leads him all over the city of New Orleans and puts him in the path of a hearse that continually bedevils him throughout the film and leads him to a funeral home filled with coffins that all bear his name and at least one with his body inside.

Melvin starts to unravel, attacking people and demanding answers everywhere he goes. The woman keeps one step ahead of him, telling him that it’s not time for them to be together yet. And as he gets closer, death seems to be everywhere. In fact, when a psychic looks at his palm and realizes that he’s already dead, a doppelgänger of Devereux calls her and she drops dead.

Look, any Fulci movie that ends with a quote that doesn’t come from the source listed — “When you go to the gates of nothingness, no one will be near you: only the shadow of your death – Book Four of the Apocalypse” — you know that you’re getting into the kind of territory that I love in a film. This fear circle of a film, made at the end of the directing life of a controversial creative force, seems filled with an understanding that the end could be just around the corner.

After Fulci came back to Rome and turned in the film, D’Amato felt that it was too static, so he went back to New Orleans and shot new scenes to improve the pace, along with changing the movie’s soundtrack. When Fulci saw what he did, he wasn’t happy. He was probably even more unhappy that his name was changed in the credits to H. Simon Kittay.

Huh? D’Amato explained, “Just before Door to Silence Fulci had made a couple of bad movies which didn’t do too well in foreign territories, so we thought it was better to use the other name from a sales point of view.”

*Massaccesi used the name John Gelardi for the production credit for the movie.

First off, that 1992 that this was made? That’s a misnomer. Much like Terror, Sexo Y Brujeria, this movie was partially made years before and then finished a decade or more later. And you’ve seen it before. And the fact that this movie was actually finished makes me overjoyed beyond belief.

Yes, Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars is really Scream Your Head Off, which was started by director John Carr and writer Philip Yordan in the early 80s. And yes, you guessed it, it was one of the segments in the infamous Night Train to Terror, a movie that has obsessed me enough to write about it more than a few times (example a and example b). While it was an unfinished film, it somehow had enough footage to make it into that bonkers anthology and even be released as its own standalone movie, which is probably all the proof you need to know just how much content needed to be out there for the dual-headed beast that was the video rental and nascent cable industry.

So even though this movie was already somewhat released twice — and shot twice, as there were nude and non-nude versions of some scenes — Carr decided to go back, grab Danger: Diabolik star John Philip Law despite the fact that he looks much older than he did in 1981 and make the movie that he always intended to film.

He also got Francine York (Secret File: Hollywood) to play Marilyn Monroe, who has been kept in an asylum for thirty years.

Obviously, the sheer weirdness of Night Train does not go away when you break it down into smaller parts.

Anyways…

Harry Billings (Law) was driving home with his new wife when he got sideswiped and she died, which leads to him sleeping barefoot on her grave. He tries to jump off a bridge on the very same road where this accident happened and gets brought to the asylum of Dr. Brewer (Arthur Braham, whose only other role is the mad scientist in the adult movie scenes within another Night Train component, Gretta AKA Death Wish Club AKA The Dark Side to Love), who uses his assistant Otto (Richard Moll, who has hair in one segment of Night Train and does not in this story) to abduct women and do whatever it is that evil geniuses do to ladies. And in that movie, that would be lobotomies and white slavery.

Oh yes, I neglected to mention that this movie willy nilly leaps from film footage to SOV back to film not caring about mixed media or taking you, the viewer, out of the experience.

The doctor also has a female partner, Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff, who only did this film), who has made a deal with an Arabic suit-wearing man to take all of the mind erased women and sell them to some harem on the other much more evil side of the world.

And then, after he himself is mind-wiped to serve as their slave, Harry finds Marilyn, who has been kept in a room filled with posters of herself and given to saying long moments of exposition: “The story they told me here was, when the studio dropped my contract, I was signed by an independent company to do a film. I didn’t know that it was owned by powerful people! They never intended to make the film! They insured my life for millions of dollars, and then they murdered a lookalike Marilyn Monroe, and left her in my bedroom!”

Of course, she could just be an insane woman in a mental asylum who thinks she’s Marilyn, but every time Harry steals away a new blonde for the evil powerful people, he stops in, visits her and falls in love. Most of the movie is Harry going to comical lengths to kidnap blondes, who are then electrocuted and then he goes back to try to woo the most famous blonde of all time. That’s a lot of blondes.

I mean, this is a movie in which John Philip Law goes to church and doses a believer right in the midst of mass, then takes her back to the asylum.

This movie is a mess, packed with continuity, time lapse, sound quality, film to video and just plan weird errors. Yet it has moments of great fun, like Marilyn’s long soliloquies and Moll looking through jars of decapitated heads, including one that has Harry’s name on it just waiting for him to screw up.

Now, my quest will take me to find the VHS version of Scream Your Head Off, but even then, I don’t feel like I’ll ever get off the Night Train.