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.

Brian DePalma didn’t want to go back to the thriller and felt like it was a step backward. Kind of like Argento going back to make Deep Red. I say this because for two guys who have been accused of being overly inspired by Hitchcock, this one feels like DePalma had a debt to pay to someone in Italy — particularly the one scene that reveals the killer that feels lifted from the end of Tenebre.

But hey — didn’t Argento get Jessica Harper for Suspiria after seeing Phantom of the Paradise?

Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) may regard his daughter Amy as a science experiment and that rightfully upsets his wife Jenny (Lolita Davidovich), but perhaps she’d be more upset if she knew that inside her husband’s brain lived a whole bunch of other folks, like a young kid named Josh, a protective nanny named Margo and the violent Cain. And oh yeah — Cain is making Carter continue the experiments on children that ruined his father’s career.

His wife is also sleeping with someone else, a man named Jack (Stephen Bauer) and she’s planning on leaving, but Carter starts implicating Jack in his crimes and then tries to drown his wife. He’s also abducted his own child and claims that she is with his father, who has been dead for years.

That’s when we meet the woman who helped Carter’s father with his book, Raising Cain. She had no idea that the man was psychologically abusing his son so that he could study the personalities that emerged from the systematic manipulation that he put him through. And oh yeah — the man has faked his death established a new identity and in Norway where his son sends children to create more multiple personality disorders.

Anyways, this movie is pure silliness in all the best of ways, with Lithgow having an absolute blast, DePalma outright referencing scenes from more than one Hitchcock — Psycho is the easiest to spot — and an ending that isn’t an ending. I’m here for all of it.

I saw this movie on a teenage date, in a theater filled with other young people and I remember that when the scene came up when Allison (Bridget Fonda) accidentally watched Hedra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) masturbating on her bed, everyone was laughing at the awkward nature of this scene. But I think about this moment a lot. And not for prurient reasons. It’s because Allison is discovering not only that the person who has taken over life is taking over even her own bed, it’s that Hedra is more secure in her own sexuality and womanhood when she takes over Allison’s persona than Allison herself is.

Director Barbet Schroeder worked in the thriller genre quite often, which is the western way of saying that he made gialli that didn’t have as much sex or style. Single White Female is the exception.

Allison has just left her philandering boyfriend and is looking for a roommate when Hedra arrives. She lost her twin in the womb and as such, she’s been seeking her twin ever since. Allison seems to be that person until her lover comes back, which leads to Hedy acting out by launching a dog to its doom (which nearly makes this a slasher; why do slasher killers always take out innocent dogs? Talk about cheap heat…).

There’s an astounding moment in this film when after Hedy gets a makeover to look exactly like Allison, she tricks her way into going down on Allison’s boyfriend. He tries to stop her when he realizes that she isn’t who she thought she was, but then she does what very few female villains do: she assaults him, robbing him of his agency and when he complains, she penetrates his eye and brain with her stiletto heel. Somewhere, Fulci is clapping like a wildman.

I always thought that it was strange that to show how off-kilter Hedy is, they show her dancing at The Vault and participating in BDSM. Oh, she must be insane if she likes pleasure!

Other than that, this movie moves toward an interesting conclusion with a tacked-on square up reel that test audiences demanded. Ah well.

Is the Full Moon Universe a thing? If we’re to take Dollman vs. Demonic Toys seriousluy, the answer is yes, as beyond getting to recycle footage from Dollman, Demonic Toys and Bad Channels, Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson) from Dollman, Nurse Ginger (Melissa Behr) who was shrunk in Bad Channels* and Judith Grey (Tracy Scoggins) from Demonic Toys all get together to battle Baby Oopsy Daisy, Jack Attack, Mr. Static and the evil G.I. Joe figure Zombietoid.

Let me just try and explain Baby Oopsy Daisy’s plan to you. As midnight draws close, a demon that has been buried in Toyland Warehouse will have its soul put inside his baby doll form, then he will impregnate Nurse Ginger, eat the shell of their child and become a human.

If you check out the Full Moon anthology The Haunted Dollhouse, you can see a cut down remix of this entitled “Dangerous Toys.” Seeing as how this entire movie is just a bunch of other movies put together, you really have to be amazed by how small the carbon footprint of Full Moon is.

*Never mind that Bunny was the one that really got shrunk.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Seed pods from space land in Comet Valley and start incubating people and hatching more of their evil kind in a plot that in no way references or has even seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and totally has Dan O’Bannon’s back when people accuse him of stealing from Shivers and It! The Terror from Beyond Space.

Peter Manoogian did direct Eliminators, so we should forgive him for this one.

Man, I set myself up by trying to do more than thirty Full Moon movies in a week, didn’t I? I’m struggling at 2 AM to say something nice about this movie. At least they didn’t make this another sequel to The Curse? It’s something to bring home if Critters is out? At least the poster is nice?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Leave it to Full Moon to make a Dr. Strange movie years before Marvel got a chance. Well, you know, unless you count the Peter Hooten-starring TV movie version. Charles Band has the option to make a Dr. Strange movie, but the option expired before production started. Yet to ensure that this movie has true Marvel DNA, the production art — back when the title was Doctor Mortalis — was by Jack Kirby, the man who pretty much invented everything the House of Ideas started with. Supposedly, another pitch, Mindmaster, became Mandroid. Kirby was never paid and ended up suing.

Anton Mordrid (Jeffrey Combs) has been sent to Earth by the Monitor to keep tabs on an evil wizard named Kabal (Brian Thompson, the Night Slasher from Cobra), a man who plans on stealing a trove of alchemical weapons and opening the gates of Hell. Mordrid has been waiting 150 years for this battle and the time is finally here.

This is a pretty big movie for Full Moon, featuring a scene where prehistoric skeletons battle in a museum and lots of magic combat. Keep your eyes open, because one of Kabal’s monsters at the end is a werewolf from The Howling.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jack Deth has the worst luck. Just when he gets one last chance to save his marriage to Lena (Helen Hunt), he gets pulled into time just in time to save Angel City from a Trancer war, but loses thirteen years of his life and loses the love of his life.

I mean, Jack has more than one love of his life. Just go with it, you know?

Now, the U.S. government is creating their own Trancers, which means that Jack is going to have to get in and shut it down along with help from a soldier that has escaped the program named R.J. (Melanie Smith, Jerry’s girlfriend Rachel), a camp escapee and an android named Shark (R. A. Mihailoff, who was Leatherface in the third film and is part of a paranormal group with Kane Hodde and Rick McCullum named the Hollywood Ghost Hunters).

You can watch this on Tubi.

David Schmoeller, who also directed Tourist Trap, Puppet Master, The Seduction, Crawlspace — and the documentary that came out of it Please Kill Mr. Kinski — and Catacombs AKA Curse IV was the man who made this movie. He has a crazy background, as he studied theater with Alejandro Jodorowsky and was mentored in film by legendary director Luis Buñuel.

This is the story of a young man named Corey Thorton (Michael Bendetti, who you may remember from the last season of 21 Jump Street or perhaps from Screwball Hotel) who has come back to Louisiana — originally, they were going to shoot this in Romania — to learn that his father’s mansion is filled with a secretive cult and bird people that can raise the dead, plus there’s lots of black magic, a brothel and a flying stone hand that has no body. It’s weird in a good way, in the kind of what did I just watch while we drank too many beers and ate too much pizza feeling that all good rental horror should be.

Oh wow! Anjanette Comer from The Baby) is there too! So is Holly Butler, who was on the TV show :20 Minute Workout and was once Universal Studios Hollywood’s premier Marilyn Monroe impersonator, so it makes sense that she plays Marilyn in this movie.

Plus it has a great poster. If your video store didn’t have this up on the wall, you may have had a bad childhood.

Netherworld also appears as “Resurrection of the Damned” in the Full Moon remix compilation Possessed.

You can watch this on Tubi.