Alex de la Iglesia met Jose Guerricaechevarria in the early 90’s, which led to their first short film,Mirindas Asesinas, in which a normal man becomes a killer. They’ve worked together ever since, particularly on the Pedro Almodovar produced Accion Mutante, a story of handicapped people fighting back in a post-apocalyptic future. He followed thet movie with this one, which won 6 Goyas — think Oscar in Spanish — including Best Director.

Father Angel Berriartua (Alaex Angulo, Pan’s Labyrinth), a priest and professor of theology, confesses to another priest that he is about to commit as much evil as possible. The other priest is shocked until he explains why, but before he can help, a large cross crushes him.

His mission takes him to Madrid, where he meets heavy metal fan, record shop clerk and Satanist Jose Maria (Santiago Segura, who has made the Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley film series that parodies Stallone’ Cobra). Jose helps Angel find a place in his mother’s boarding house and continue his path toward evil, which guides him to steal a book by occult TV show host Professor Cavan.

Jose and Angel decide to kidnap the Professor and force him to teach them how to sell their souls to the devil. Why? Angel has decoded that Bible and learned that the Antichrist will be born at midnight on Christmas Eve. If he sells his soul, the Devil will trust him and allow him to witness the birth, which will allow him to sneak in and kill the Antichrist, saving the world.

The ritual will need the blood of a virgin, which is no easy feat in modern Madrid. Luckily, Mina, who lives in Jose’s mother’s boarding house, is one. As Angel draws her blood, he’s surprised by Jose’s mother, who ends up killing herself with a shotgun by accident. No matter — the threesome instead burns a piece of paper chaos magic style, takes LSD and finishes the ritual. Cavan jokes that it’s all a farce until a goat appears and the devil taunts them in a message, saying that he knows Angel’s plan.

Do they find the devil? You bet. A movie this insane totally needs a nearly nude gigantic Satan wandering the rooftops, ready to chuck people off to their doom. Even crazier, most rituals showed in the films are real Satanist rituals and weren’t altered at all. Or so they say.

After the movie’s moderate success in the US, de la Iglesia sold the rights for an American remake, which he was goign to direct. It never happened, nor did his opportunity to direct Alien: Resurrection. However, he did direct his next movie, Perdita Durango, in the U.S.

Man, we totally missed this in our Christmas movies and in our heavy metal movie spotlights, but I’m so happy that this movie is finally on our site.

Frank Marshall is more known as a producer than a director. After all, he was in that role for movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, Back to the Future and so many more films, but he didn’t direct until 1990’s Arachnophobia. He also helmed Alive and Eight Below, as well as this film. Again — he’s much better known as a producer, as he’s since executive produced the Jason Bourne and Jurassic Park films.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, a Michael Crichton novel also inspired this film, which had a long history before it finally played cinemas.

After the success of The First Great Train Robbery, Crichton wanted to write a movie for Sean Connery, as the character of Charles Munro, who he saw as an analog to Allan Quatermain. Ironically, that’s the character that Connery would play in his final screen role in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Crichton pitched the idea to producer Frank Yablans — the same guy who brought us The Fury, Mommie Dearest and Kidco — who liked the idea so much that he — without Crichton’s authorization thank you very much — sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, a year before the book was published.

Once Crichton learned that he could not use a real gorilla to portray the character of Amy, he left the project. The film was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter before years later, Marshall came on board. That all came to pass because, during the making of Jurassic Park, Crichton was impressed with Stan Winston’s work. Producer Kathleen Kennedy suggested that Winston could make the apes for Congo, talked to her husband — yep, Frank Marshall — about the project and Yablans came back on board again.

However, the final film is only loosely based on the Crichton script, with John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) taking over the writing duties.

While testing a communications laser in the Congo, TraviCom employees Charles Travis (Bruce Campbell!) and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city. However, it looks like everyone dies as the company watches the exploration via satellite by Karen Ross (Laura Linney), a former CIA operative and also the former fiancee of Travis, whose dad R.B. (Joe Don Baker!) owns the company. Man, talk about run-on sentences.

There’s also primatologist Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), who has a mountain gorilla named Amy, who can speak via a special glove that translates sign language to audio. She’s been drawing jungles and intricate gems, which means that Peter thinks she should go back home to Africa. He funds that trip via Karen and TraviCom, as well as Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).

They’re led by the greatest hunter of all time, Captain Monroe Kelly. You know what they always say: if you can’t get Sean Connery, get Ernie Hudson. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — Killer Kroc from Suicide Squad — shows up as Munro’s second-in-command Kahega. And hey — there’s Joe Pantoliano as another merc! And John Hawkes (Eastbound & Down) is also here, as well as Delroy Lindo and Kevin Grevioux from the Underworld movies.

Between native tribes, gorillas being used to guard diamond mines and Tim Curry getting killed by a pack of those gorillas — not to mention a subplot that has Dr. Elliot upset when Amy ends up getting rawdogged (rawaped?) by a silverback and leaving humanity for the jungle, this movie literally looks like studio notes on film. There’s everything for somebody, I guess. Curry and Hudson are having a blast, however. Hudson is almost in a totally different movie than anyone else and has called out Congo as the best time he ever had making a movie. It shows.

1990’s kids had Kenner on hand to help them recreate the story of the Lost City of Zinj with Congo action figures. You could grab Peter, Karen, Kahega, Peter and Amy for the good guys — well, I guess protagonists, maybe, but who wants to tell kids that they are protagonists versus good guys? And then for the apes, you have Blastface, Mangler, Zinj Apes and the deluxe Bonecrusher. There were also two vehicles, the Net Trap and Trail Hacker. They fit into the Kenner aesthetic, just like their RoboCop and Jurassic Park figures. Seriously, Kenner made figures for every movie it seemed like — they made Waterworld figures, after all!

Speaking of Jurassic Park, my feeling on this movie has been that everyone wanted to will another series of films much like Crichton’s novel into existence. This whole thing was vaporware, based on a story that the author never really finished made by people who didn’t have any real concern with the source material, which never really existed in the first place. Millions were dumped into it and it actually did pretty well — $152 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — but no one really remembers it.

All they do remember is that there was a scene where one of the Zinj gorillas uses a laser. That scene doesn’t exist in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering it in a Mandela Effect moment.

Theater of the Sea is one of the oldest marine mammal facilities in the world and has been operated by the McKenney family since its inception in 1946. Thousands have thrilled to its daily aquatic shows, yet somehow, it became the host for an Italian made for TV and then direct to video opus known as Cruel Jaws or The Beast and best of all, Jaws 5.

Yes, just imagine if the excitement of a film crew coming to your local otter park, shooting a movie in your neighborhood, and then the man you were told was William Snyder ends up being Bruno Mattei – the very same madman behind The Other Hell, Shocking Dark and Rats: Night of Terror.

An excitable Miami Herald article from December 4, 1994 proclaimed the big news that the town of El Portal was now Hampton Bay, which is perhaps Amity Island’s sister city. If they only knew what mania lay in wait. For Bruno Mattei was about to craft not just a shark movie, but a remix of all of his favorites. Yes, much like Girltalk or similar DJs mix together multiple songs to create a new patchwork narrative, Mattei was about to throw copyright laws and common sense to the wind to create an entirely new shark movie.

It all starts with a ship evading the Coast Guard to pilfer the remains of a sunken ship called the Cleveland because possibly Mattei had no idea what the Edmund Fitzgerald was. Within seconds, the scuba scavengers are beset not by pilfered footage from Enzo G. Castellari’s Great White. Yes, a movie that was sued into oblivion for ripping off Jaws has now suffered the very same unkind cut! That’s when the credits roll and promise us “Original Shark Design And Special Effects Created By Larry Mannini.” I’m here to inform you, dear reader, that none of these effects are original. Even more to the point, I refuse to believe that Larry Mannini is a real person. Much like Lewis Coates, David Hills and Raf Donato, I think it’s an alter ego to cover up that Mattei just simply spliced sharks from a variety of movies into this opus.

Soon, we meet Billy Morrison, who is not like Matt Hooper in any way, as he drives with his girlfriend Vanessa as she chides him for leaving her last summer to chase killer whales. This year, he promises her sailing, tennis and disco until dawn. If only, Billy. He’s on the way to meet his pal Dag Snerensen, a Hulk Hogan lookalike with two kids — Bobby and the wheelchair-bound Susy — who also owns a bottom tier Sea World.

Susy lost the use of her legs in the accident that also took Dag’s wife out of this world. And now it’s time to meet Sheriff Berger, who serves the Hulkster’s brother with an eviction notice. Turns out that he’s three months behind on his rent to the evil land baron Samuel Lewis and only has 30 days to pay up. 

But where are the sharks, you ask? Fear not. A bunch of kids running along the beach trip over the remains of one of the scuba guys from before and unlike an American movie that would just show their frightened faces, this film lingers over the gory latex aftermath. One autopsy later and Brody and Hopper – whoops, I mean Berger and Morrison — want to close the beach during the busiest weekend of the season.

After several party scenes and moments of cavorting on the beach, Mattei grows bored with presenting human beings that act like no real people you’ve ever met before and decides to start the killing anew, as a girl runs smack dab into the Chrissie Watkins scene from Jaws. Again, I’m not saying it’s a similar shot. It’s the exact same footage grafted into this film.

It turns out that the antagonist in this movie is a tiger shark engineered by the Navy to be a superweapon. Now, it’s killing people all over Hampton Island, so this film is also stealing the plot of Piranha, another movie directly inspired by Jaws. Along the way, the Mafia subplot from the novel Jaws was based on, the windsurfing race from The Last Shark and a Regatta stolen from Jaws 2 all happen. It’s like K-Tel’s Greatest Shark Attacks of the 1980’s with all your favorite great white super hits! 

If none of this convinces you that you need to see this film — made by an Italian crew shooting a largely amateur group of Americans — then let me add that Mattei included some of John Williams’ music from Star Wars on his soundtrack, where it sits alongside screaming synth music and generic disco. Truly, this movie has something for everyone.

“You’re a piece of shit! You’re vomit! You’re nobody!” one character yells at another at one point. It’s dialogue like this that keeps me coming back to Italian bootleg cinema. In fact, the word shit is thrown around here like a racist epithet in a Tarantino film; allusions to feces fill nearly every story beat of this epic. Yet the greatest line is when the sheriff yells, “We’re going to need a bigger helicopter.” You really can’t write dialogue that great, It just has to happen.

Scream Factory, a subsidiary of Shout! Factory, once planned to release this movie on blu ray as a double feature along with Exterminators of the Year 3000. However, once they realized how much footage this movie cribbed from the Jaws trilogy and other Italian shark epics, they canceled the release.

That’s cowardice. Was Bruno Mattei worried about stealing directly from Spielberg even after years of lawsuits against any film that came close to Jaws? Nope. He didn’t just take from the original, but its two sequels as well. It was if he was daring the American judicial system to come after him. 

Please keep in mind that this is no Sharknado or sub-Troma effort. Mattei was really trying to make a great shark movie. And that’s why I love this movie, particularly the big shark attack sequence about an hour into the film where everyone devolves into screaming morons. There were no second takes in this movie, no ADR re-recorded audio, no one in wardrobe to tell one of the girls that her white leotard outfit is ridiculous, no focus group to warn the filmmakers that this movie is borderline incomprehensible. 

Yet with every viewing, my romance with Cruel Jaws grows more passionate. How can you not love a movie that ends ninety minutes of body munching gore and profanity-laden dialogue with a Scooby Doo-laugh filled close where a seal launches the newly redeemed bad guy into the ocean?

This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum Special Issue #4, which you can buy here.

Richard Donner gets a lifetime pass from me for The Omen and Superman, not to mention The Goonies, Scrooged and the Lethal Weapon films. He also directed the original “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode of The Twilight Zone. But for all these films, sometimes you must endure some of his misfires, like The Toy and, well, Assassins.

The original spec script was written by The Wachowskis, who sold it for $1 million to producer Joel Silver. He must have been flush with cash at the time, as he also bought their script for The Matrix for a million too. He then offered Donner $10 million to direct the film, but first, he wanted the violence toned down and Stallone’s character made more sympathetic. That means that Brian Helgeland (976-EVIL, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Man On Fire, which he also directed) was brought in to do a rewrite, which led to the Wachowskis trying to get their names off the movie before being refused by the Writers Guild of America.

Robert Rath (Sylvester Stallone) is an assassin who wants to retire. He’s haunted by the memories of killing his mentor and has lost a step, as Miguel Bain (Antonio Banderas) gets to his next mark before he can.

Bain’s goal is to be number one, which means he has to take out Rath. Then they both take on the mission of taking out Electra (Julianne Moore), a computer hacker. All manner of shenanigans ensue, placing both men in one another’s crosshairs repeatedly.

Honestly, I struggled to even get through this one. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve watched thirty Stallone movies in seven days, but I don’t think that’s the problem. This is just boring where it could be so much better, although I love Banderas in the film. He made the actor’s decision to only eat fruit in the movie, which makes no sense, but it’s one hilarious bit of method acting.

Since the second issue of 2000 AD, Judge Dredd has ruled over the streets of Mega-City One, a domed city that contains most of the East Coast of America. The Judges are empowered to be judge, jury and executioner, keeping the lawless post-apocalyptic land of the future as safe as possible.

This movie isn’t anywhere near as beloved as the comic. Co-creator John Wagner said, “I hated that plot. It was Dredd pressed through the Hollywood cliché mill, a dynastic power struggle that had little connection with the character we know from the comic.” He also added, “The story had nothing to do with Judge Dredd, and Judge Dredd wasn’t really Judge Dredd even though Stallone was perfect for the part.”

Joseph Dredd (Stallone) assists first-year Judge Hershey (Diane Lane) in ending a block war (an uncredited James Remar appears in this scene). As Dredd and Hershey quell the rebellion, Herman “Fergee” Ferguson (Rob Schneider) is caught up in the arrests.

Meanwhile, Judge Griffin (Jurgen Prochnow, Sutter Cane from In the Mouth of Madness) releases a former judge named Rico (Armand Assante), who just so happens to be Dredd’s brother, from prison. He reactivates an ABC Warrior combat robot (another 2000 AD series) and murders Hammond (Mitchell Ryan, the Dark Shadows TV show and Dr. Wynn from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers), a reporter who was critical of Dredd’s methods.

Dredd is put on trial by the Chief Judges, including the villainous Griffin and his mentor, Chief Justice Fargo (Max von Sydow). To save our hero, Fargo agrees to step down and enacts the final service of all Judges — doing the long walk into the Cursed Earth while Dredd is sentenced to life in prison.

Rico causes chaos while the cannibalistic Angel Gang attack’s Dredd’s transport to prison. Joining up with Fergee, they escape and are saved by the final sacrifice of Fargo, who is killed by Mean Machine Angel. Before dying, Fargo reveals that Dredd and Rico are the progeny of the Janus project, a genetic engineering effort to create the perfect judge. This explains why Dredd’s DNA was at the crime scene, as Rico’s is identical to his.

Of course, Dredd has to come back and save Mega-City One, ending with a battle between the man who is the law and Rico atop the Statue of Liberty.

To be perfectly honest, Judge Dredd is a mess. Even though it was made more than three years after Demolition Man, a film that it is quite similar to, it feels incredibly dated. The film gets the look of Mega-City One right, but none of the humor or nuance. That said, the Gianni Versace-designed costumes are awesome and I love that Adrienne Barbeau is the voice of computer at the Hall of Justice.

The film had to be submitted to the MPAA five times to get an R rating when its goal was PG-13. And the constant creative disputes led director Danny Cannon to swear he’d never work with another big name actor. He’s gone on to direct I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Geostorm, as well as being a major part of the CSI and Gotham TV shows. Stallone wanted an action comedy film while Cannon wanted a darker, more satirical vision that was closer to the source material.

Stallone would tell Uncut “I do look back on Judge Dredd as a real missed opportunity. It seemed that lots of fans had a problem with Dredd removing his helmet, because he never does in the comic books. But for me it is more about wasting such great potential there was in that idea; just think of all the opportunities there were to do interesting stuff with the Cursed Earth scenes. It didn’t live up to what it could have been.”

If you live anywhere other than Pittsburgh, this movie — much like Striking Distance — is a DVD that you can find in the $1 section. Here, it’s a prized commodity, a remembrance of the Steel City in the 1990s and a time when the owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ wife decided that she wanted to make a movie.

That’s right — Howard Baldwin, chairman of the Pittsburgh Penguins, was one of the film’s backers. The goal was to use the stadium and a game between the Pens and the Chicago Blackhawks as a backdrop, but there was a lockout due to the owners and players not coming to terms. That meant that an exhibition game between the two teams didn’t have the intensity that the filmmakers wanted, so they got the minor league Johnstown Chiefs and Wheeling Thunderbirds to play in front of 3,000 extras, with the rest of the crowd being cardboard cutouts. Seriously — look for the fake fans.

Darren McCord (Van Damme!) may be French Canadian, but he’s a true Yinzer. Once, he was a firefighter but he was unable to save a young girl from a house fire. He lost his wife and barely sees his family, who live in a nice house up on Mt. Washington while he’s probably living in Carrick or Brookline (I’m trying to make this review so Pittsburgh-centric that it will only appear as blips and bleeps to anyone outside of Allegheny County).

Now he’s the fire marshall for the Civic Arena — long gone for the several times renamed PPG Paints Arena — and finds himself in the midst of a terrorist situation when former CIA agent Joshua Foss (Powers Boothe, who played Jim Jones in the made for TV movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones) wires the Igloo up with explosives and takes the Vice-President hostage.

Yes, this is a movie directly tied into the end of a hockey game causing bombs to blow up an ice hockey arena. A film where JCVD does battle with the Pens’ penguin mascot, Iceburgh. Where even supposed good guys are really on the side of evil. And where Van Damme can create homemade flamethrowers and even get on the ice himself to save the day.

If you’re a fan of 1990’s hockey, this is the film for you. Jay Caufield, Mario Lemieux and Luc Robitaille, as does venerable Pens announcer Mike Lange, who is one of the few announcers left who isn’t some vanilla pretty boy who barely knows the game. Instead, he’s given to loudly shouted Lange-isms like “She wants to sell my monkey!” and “Get in the fast lane, grandma! This bingo game is ready to roll!” You can hear his signature “It’s a hockey night in Pittsburgh!” call in this film as well. Not to brag, but of all the names in my phone, the fact that I have Lange’s makes me probably the happiest (we worked together on several radio commercials).

I rarely take pictures with celebrities, but Mike Lange transcends my rules.

Director Peter Hyams has an interesting IMDB list, working on films like Capricorn One, The Star Chamber, 2010, Outland, Running Scared, The Presidio, Stay Tuned and Timecop before this one. He’d go on to make The Relic — a film I was asked to quiet down during my laugh-filled viewing of it at Mann’s Chinese Theater — and End of Days. He elevates this above it being just another Die Hard clone.

You know who else does? Powers Boothe. He’s one of the best bad guys ever here. And to top it all off, he read the audio book of the film. This is the holy grail here in Pittsburgh, a valuable artifact worth its weight in pierogies.

BONUS: Listen to Becca and I discuss Sudden Death on our podcast: