EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Directed, written, produced, starring and edited by Mark Polonia, this movie makes Carnosaur look like a 5D CGI spectacle by comparison, but come on. It was shot by a teenager in Pennsylvania and has the energy that that statement embodies.

I mean, what’s your tolerance for stop motion dinosaurs on green screen and Amiga graphics? You’re either the kind of person that looks at this and thinks it’s complete junk or you get obsessed and can’t turn away. There’s really no in-between. You know what side I end up on, because I’ve seen so many Polonia films, like the sequel to this, Saurians 2. Hell, I even have a signed copy.

Explosions wake up two dinosaurs, who proceed to destroy most of Mark’s hometown, Wellsboro, PA. It looks like this movie is all him and not as much of his brother John, who does show up as an extra. And Mark cares about you, his audience, so much that he even has his future wife do a shower scene.

But yeah. Rubbery dinosaurs.

After The Thing and Prince of Darkness, this is the third and final part of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. It’s a film that explores the very notion of reality, how fictional characters perceive themselves within a narrative, and issues of creation itself. It’s a natural next step after Prince of Darkness, playing with many of the same themes.

The film begins with a narrative device familiar to readers of H.P. Lovecraft, as Dr. Wrenn (David Warner, The Omen, From Beyond the Grave) visits a patient in a psychiatric hospital who has written all over the walls and himself, covering them with crosses.

John Trent (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) is an insurance investigator who can smell out a co like no one else. We’re shown an example in the beginning, as he breaks down a scam being perpetrated by a business owner (Carpenter, regular Peter Jason). Later, he meets with the owner of an insurance company (Bernie Casey, Gargoyles) who gives him a new case: investigating a claim made by Arcane Publishing that their biggest-selling author, Sutter Cane, has disappeared.

Just then, a man attacks them with an axe. He stops to ask Trent, “Do you read Sutter Cane?” The police shoot him, and later, we learn that this man was Cane’s agent, who was so influenced by reading his latest manuscript that he killed his entire family.

Trent meets Arcand Publishing owner Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston!), who asks him to look into the disappearance with the help of Cane’s editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen, Fright Night Part 2). As he begins to read Cane’s books, Trent learns that his readers have been known to suffer from disorientation, memory loss and paranoia firsthand.

He’s also convinced that this disappearance is a publicity stunt. Yet he spends plenty of time tearing apart Cane’s book covers, which depict the state of New Hampshire and mark Hobbs End, the location for many of Cane’s stories—a setting quite similar to Castle Rock in Stephen King’s tales.

As they travel to the fictional town, Linda begins to see things, and they both lose track of day and night. Once in the city, the people and landmarks are precisely as they appeared in the written word. Trent believes this is still a publicity stunt. Linda comes clean and says that the disappearance started as a stunt, but no one can find Cane. Everything that happened from now on is real, she claims.

For example, inside their hotel room, Trent claims there should be a black church out the window. The only problem is that he didn’t read the books closely enough. While the first window he opens reveals nothing, the evil cathedral is shown when he opens the window that faces east.

As they travel to the church, an army of black dogs emerges to defend Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow, Dune, The Keep), who sits inside. Linda confronts him, but simply being exposed to his final novel, In the Mouth of Madness, drives her insane.

The fabric of reality has begun to tear asunder. A man (former pro wrestler Wilhelm von Homburg, who played Viggo in Ghostbusters 2, who led an insane and demented actual life) tells Trent that Cane has his son, and he can no longer save him. His own daughter attacked him, and he could do nothing to stop her. He wishes that he could tell him more, but this is how Cane wrote him. With that sentence hanging in the ether, the man blows his brains out with a shotgun.

The townspeople have become monsters, and the story beats of each of Cane’s tales have started to come true. Trent tries to drive away but keeps coming back to the center of town. He takes Linda with him, but she transforms into a monster. Finally, he crashes his car and wakes up inside the church. Cane explains to him that his stories ended up being true, an almost Bible for a new and more horrible world. As more of his readers began to believe in his stories, they raised a race of Ancient Ones from the before times. Again, this is well-trod ground for anyone who has read Lovecraft, but it is not something that often makes it to the screen.

Cane explains that Trent is just one of his characters, and his role is to help end humanity by delivering his final story to Arcane. He then tears his face open, sending Trent to the dimension of the monsters from beyond time and space. As he runs down a long tunnel to return to the real world, he begs Linda to come with him. She says that since she has read the whole book, she can’t.

Once Trent returns, he destroys the story. But once he visits Arcane, he learns that Linda never existed, and the final book has already been published. In fact, they are almost done making a movie. Trent is then arrested after attacking readers of the book with an axe.<

We come back to the asylum, where Dr. Wrenn laughs off the story and walks away to leave, only to have the attendant, Saperstein (John Glover, Gremlins 2), ask him, “Do you read Sutter Cane?”

Trent barely sleeps at night, convinced that people are fighting and dying outside the walls of his cell. He awakens to find the hospital and most of the city abandoned, with only the pages of Sutter Cane books left behind. A radio announces that mass murder and suicides are happening in every major city, with some people mutating into monsters.

Finally, he wanders into a theater where In the Mouth of Madness is playing. As he watches the entire movie replay, he begins to laugh hysterically before breaking down and crying. He is just another character in another story, never real in the first place.

Between characters named Pickman and the closeness of Cane’s titles to Lovecraft’s (Sutter Cane’s novels have similar titles to H.P. Lovecraft stories: The Whisperer of the Dark is The Whisperer in Darkness, The Thing in the Basement is The Thing on the Doorstep and The Haunter Out of Time is almost The Haunter of the Dark or The Shadow Out of Time), this is probably the closest we’ll get to a significant budget Lovecraft film that isn’t Re-Animator. All of the words read from Cane’s books are also from Lovecraft, including parts of The Rats in the Walls and The Haunter of the Dark.

Beyond that, even the town’s name — Hobb’s End — is a reference to a work that is close to the heart of Carpenter. It’s the train station where the spaceship is found in Quatermass and the Pit. The inscription on the church, “Let these doors be sealed by our Lord God and let any who dare enter this unholy site be damned forever,” is similar to the words “Terribilis est locus iste” found at France’s Rennes Le Château. In English, that should read “This place is terrible.”

Even more interesting, if you pause and read the movie poster for the movie within the movie, you’ll learn that, aside from the three main characters, all the actual people who worked on the film are listed. So is the movie real? Was Cane ever real? Was Trent just a made-up character? Are we real? Is reality just an illusion?

The Arrow 4K UHD of In the Mouth of Madness has a new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Arrow Films; commentary with director John Carpenter and producer Sandy King Carpenter; another with Carpenter and director of photography Gary B. Kibbe; another with filmmakers Rebekah McKendry & Elric Kane, co-hosts of Colors of the Dark podcast; interviews with Sandy King Carpenter, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen and Greg Nicotero; featurettes and appreciations of the movie; behind-the-scenes footage; theatrical trailer and TV commercials; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla and a perfect bound collector’s book featuring new writing on the film by Guy Adams, Josh Hurtado, Richard Kadrey, George Daniel Lea, Willow Catelyn Maclay and Alexandra West. You can get it from MVD.

John Larson (Ian Jacklin) has lost a friend to the underground fighting world. Man, the fight clubs from the early direct-to-video 90s continue to make me so happy to watch old films that no one cares about but me. Anyway, Ian Jacklin was a karate champ, and that was enough in 1994 to get him to star in a movie.

Nick Wallace (Nicholas Hill) and John work in physical labor jobs, but there’s no money to be made working on the docks. The union has been on strike, and they’re down on their luck. It’s tough—so tough. So John leaves town, and Nick goes into the fighting world, and that brings John back to save his pal.

Paul Landis (Martin Kove) is a fight promoter who pals around with his main fighter, Mark Vanik (Matthias Hues, who is on the poster instead of the star), who finds them going around and blowing up other mob bosses like Jimmie Fratello (Richard Lynch). Yes, Richard Lynch is in this movie just long enough to reach the 90s video union rules for getting his name in the credits.

With the help of reporter Danielle Richardson (Renee Allman), fight promoter Big Man (Bob Wyatt, the director of Rhonda Sheer’s Tender Loving Care and one of the writers), neighborhood tomboy Tommy (Michele “Mouse” Krasnoo from Kickboxer 4) and Benny “The Jet” Urquidez playing himself, John will search for his missing friend. Is it silly for me to see this as two male couples fighting each other instead of just celebrating that love between them would solve things? This is not unfounded: Kove and Hues’ characters straight up get a massage together and watch the fights like an old couple taking in the theater. Bless them, I want them to be happy.

This has Brick Bronsky, Madusa and Tony “Ludvig Borga” Halme, three pro wrestlers, as bad guys, plus Lisa London (Rocky from Savage Beach), porn star Dick Nasty billed as Peter “Sugarfoot” London in a fight with Ed Neal (who played Lord Zedd), direction by Joe Coppoletta (who did episodes of Knots Landing and Falcon Crest before this movie), a script co-written by Steve Tymon (Fraternity Demon, Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur, John T. Bone’s Dark Secrets, the Ring of Fire movies) and the feeling that this could be a off-brand Capcom beat ’em up (SNK? Irem?) come to life.

Shion (Makiko Kuno) is the most perfect killer in the Magnificat crime religion. Raised from birth to kill without passion or emotion by Father Kano (Koji Shimizu), she sees a photo of herself taken by a reporter named Ito (Johnny Ôkura). It shocks her into feeling something, as does his begging for his life on his knees, which soon turns into him going down on her, showing her that there is pleasure beyond being a mindless death giver.

Imagine a Hong Kong girl with guns movie, but add more sex- lots more- and base it on a manga, Shion by Mangetsu Hanamura, and you get a slight bit of what this is all about. It’s also better than you can imagine.

From BDSM electrical marital aid torture from fellow killer Mitsuko (Maiko Kazama) to having to choose between killing her new lover or giving up everything she has learned, this is a quick, down-and-dirty bit of V-cinema perfection.

Director Masaru Konuma made plenty of Roman Porno for Nikkatsu and the Woman In the Box movies. Star Makiko Kuno was a model—a Pocari Sweat girl, no less—and is a sommelier today. This is the second in the XX series, following XX: Beautiful Weapon, with XX: Beautiful Beast, XX: Beautiful Target, XX: Beautiful Prey, and XX: Beautiful Killing Machine also in the series.

If you ever said, “I wish La Femme Nikita felt like a rougie,” good news. This is it.

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, an interview with screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, a video essay by critic and Japanese cinema expert Patrick Macias and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.