Honestly, they could have made hundreds of movies in the Heroic Trio series and I would have watched every single one of them. The Wonder Woman (Anita Mui), The Invisible Girl (Michelle Yeoh) and The Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung) have returned, but the city around them has been decimated from a nuclear attack.

Unlike most superhero films, each of the characters has made major growth in their lives. Wonder Woman is now a mother, hiding her powers to become a better provider. Invisible Girl works to atone for being evil and even trains her former master’s hunchbacked henchman Kau to be a hero. And Thief Catcher may try to steal everything, but she now realizes that she is part of something bigger than herself.

Director Siu-Tung Ching also made the A Chinese Ghost Story series and he directed this with original Heroic Trio maker Johnnie To.

I often obsess about how sequels never change up the game. This movie decided to take a colorful comic book romp and make it a violent and bleak post-apocalyptic movie about the lack of water at the end of the world and the changing roles of women. Hong Kong, you always have so many surprises.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul Andolina already covered this film way back on March 17, 2019 but now we’re doing a whole week of these movies. 

Leprechaun was supposed to be a straight horror film, but what made it work was Warwick David bringing more humor to his role and lots and lots of gore. In fact, I would argue that more blood and guts can improve almost every movie.

Ten years before this movie starts, Dan O’Grady has come back from Ireland with a stolen pot of gold, which he buries just in time for leprechaun to kill his wife and try to murder him, too. He uses a four-leaf clover to stop him, traps the evil mini-monster — whose name is Lubdan — in a crate and then promptly has a stroke.

Later, J.D. Redding and his kids — yep, that’s a very young Jennifer Aniston — move into the farmhouse and, is the way that horror films work, free the leprechaun, who promptly going wild to get his gold back.

Writer and director Mark Jones was influenced by the small monsters in Critters and a Lucky Charms commercial to make this movie. Well, it worked. It worked so well we’re doing every one of the seven sequels on the site this week.

There are some interesting thanks in the credits. George Lucas is one of them, as he let Davis make the movie despite having him under contract. And Dan Quayle sped up a working visa for Davis.

Leprechaun was Trimark’s first homemade movie and 1993’s first movie release. They went all out hyping it, with everything from having Davis ring the American Stock Exchange opening bell* to NBA teams having Leprechaun Nights and even bypassing Domino’s Pizza and Subway corporate to reach out directly to their franchises to sell the movie. It worked, because this low budget film was the number one movie of the week when it premiered.

*Lucky Charms cereal ripped this off, which has to sting. They had allowed a scene with their cereal in the movie until they saw it, which is why the line “Fuck you, Lucky Charms!” is in this.

Alfredo Salazar wrote some pretty great movies, like Las Mujeres Panteras, The Batwoman, the Aztec Mummy films and some Santo movies. He only directed ten movies, with this one being his last. And oh man, what a way to go out.

Tony (Roberto Guinar, who must have a thing for weird dolls, because he also directed the absolutely nightmarish Muerte Infernal) and his wife Annie (Holda Ramírez) have returned to Mexico due to Tony’s aunt dying and giving him her mansion. While he’s working, Annie finds plenty of black magic implements and a clown doll. He explains it like, “Yeah of course she did a lot of witchcraft. No big deal.” And Annie is fine with it. So fine that they cerdo hormiguero and nine months later Tony’s a dad. Well…not before the clown kills his wife and his son Roy is safely born in the hospital.

Fast forward a few years and Roy (Alan Fernando) has become obsessed with the clown, whose name is Payasito. He then gets a new mommy — Tony’s secretary Doris (Lorena Herrera) — who soon realizes that the doll is evil and has to go.

There are long stretches of this movie where nothing happens. These are important because they will make you forget the little person named Margarito Esparza Nevare playing Payasito. He is absolutely terrifying every single moment that he appears in this movie, whether he’s stabbing someone, lynching the maid, assaulting someone and sometimes just standing there. He’s one of the most frightening visuals I have ever seen in any movie I’ve ever seen. Just imagine how bad that gets.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ami Dolenz — yes, the daughter of Mickey — takes over for Tawney Kitaen here as the Ouija-based mayhem continues. Writer/director Kevin Tenney is also back to tell the tale of Paige, who is becoming possessed through the board, discovering the spirit of the woman who once lived in her new apartment.

Who was Susan Sidney, the woman obsessing her heroine, keeping her locked inside to paint numerous images of her? An innocent? An exotic dancer prostituting herself? And what happened to her? Well, it’s a good thing Mickey dates a cop!

Tenney actually did research into progressive entrapment, where the spirits contacted by the Ouija board would slowly take over the lives of those who came in contact with them. While he didn’t believe in the veracity of the occult, he did say that the whole thing seemed creepy.

It was pretty cool seeing horror fan and SNL alumnus Laraine Newman show up in this.

This is the only Witchboard movie to not be packed with nudity. That’s because Dolenz had a no-nudity clause. However, Republic Pictures’ foreign sales department — yep, that old excuse that international markets need nudity — pressures Tenney into pushing for her to disrobe. The director and thinks this is why they tried to keep him out of the third movie in the series.

Hey — a dude gets killed by a boiler room. That’s worth your time, right?

Words

If you have ever had a nightmare of being abducted by aliens, maybe avoid this movie. It’s harrowing and has one of the most brutal alien encounters scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.

Based on Travis Walton’s book The Walton Experience, which describes a “this really happened” extraterrestrial encounter, this movie features D.B. Sweeney as the author and Robert Patrick plays his brother-in-law. It also may be the second time Henry Thomas met an alien, but trust me, this one doesn’t go as well.

November 5, 1975. Snowflake, Arizona,. Loggers Travis Walton (Sweeney), Mike Rogers (Patrick), Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer, One Tree Hill), David Whitlock (Peter Berg, Very Bad Things), Greg Hayes (Thomas) and Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg, Class of 1999) are out in the woods when a UFO blasts Walton away to, well, somewhere and the other men are accused of murder by Sheriff Blake Davis (Noble Willingham) and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner).

However, Walton shows up alive days later, suffering from flashbacks to the nightmare that he has survived, one that no one believes. However, the filmmakers thought the real Walton’s story was boring, so they embellished. And by embellished, I mean they went into nightmare crazy world and made a movie that still scares me every time I watch it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

1993 was a weird time. I mean, 2020 is a weird time too, but I’ve often discussed the pre-millennial tension that the world was suffering from, as well as the pre-WWW explosion of zines and the output of Feral House, whose Apocalypse Culture was a bible for the many behaviors and trends of the coming end of the world. Little did we know we’d all be sitting in our houses watching TV and wearing paper masks. The armageddon that James Shelby Downard was leading to seemed a lot cooler, to be honest.

Jesus Christ Allin was given that named because his mother claimed that the Son of God visited her and said that he would be a great man. His brother Merle couldn’t pronounce that name, but could say it phonetically. Hence, GG Allin.

The boys’ father was, to be charitable, a maniac and an abusive religious nut who continually promised to kill them, even digging a grave for the family in the cellar. This makes more sense when you think of all the times that GG promised that he would kill himself on stage.

Oh man. I’m writing this in a bubble thinking that everyone knows who he is. And then I realize that Allin died 27 years ago, in a time where there was no true-crime culture and only weirdos were obsessed with John Wayne Gacy.

This is an oversimplification, but Allin’s stage shows were mainly him attempting a song and then terrorizing the audience. Sometimes that involved baiting them with words or threats of violence. Other times, he’d shit all over the stage, put the microphone up his ass and throw feces at people.

You know. Rock and roll.

Somehow, Todd Phillips — yes, the man who directed Joker — made this at NYU before a career that includes Old School, Starsky & Hutch and three The Hangover movies. I don’t say that in an elitist way. It’s just interesting to go from GG bloody and scat-strewn on stage screaming to yuks.

There’s no real point of view in this, but you’re either going in knowing who Allin was, or as a fan, or as someone with preconceived notions of whether or not what he was doing was art. In today’s culture, the lyrics and actions of Allin wouldn’t have made him the underground counterculture force that he was. He’d have been canceled long before. Yet for a time, there he was, literally screaming, pissing and shitting into the wind.

You can watch this on Tubi.