I’ve put off watching this for years — 28 of them! — because I knew how it would impact me.

This is it. This is the end of Godzilla, as there’s no escape from death for any of us. The only question is whether it will come at the ends of the new and unstoppable kaiju Destroyah, which has come from the Oxygen Destroyer that has stopped Godzilla before, or from the fact that inside the creature’s heart, Godzilla has a nuclear reactor that is melting down.

The twenty-second film in the series and the seventh and final in the Heisei era, this is also the last movie for actress Momoko Kōchi, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and composer Akira Ifukube.

So much of this is a callback to the first movie, starting with hearing the roar before the title.

Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka, who is in six of the Heisei era films) of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) has been tracking Godzilla and Little Godzilla since SpaceGodzilla was destroyed. She finds out that a volcanically triggered uranium deposit has caused Godzilla to go into meltdown and when his temperature reaches 1,200 °C, he will explode and melt the Earth with him.

The UNGCC finds a college student named Kenkichi Yamane (Yasufumi Hayashi), the grandson of Dr. Kyohei Yamane, the inventor of the Oxygen Destroyer. They use the Super X III to cool Godzilla for as long as they can. At the same time, crustaceans mutated by the Oxygen Destroyer rise and start to kill people before joining into one kaiju form known as Destroyah.

Miki uses Little Godzilla to fight the monster in the hopes that Godzilla will save him and die a valiant death in battle before blowing up. Instead, the child-like Godzilla is killed by Destroyah’s Micro-Oxygen beam as the kaiju final boss enters its perfect form.

As the scientists try to stop Godzilla, it mutates into a meltdown form, looking as if its covered with lava. It tears Destroyah apart, who is stopped by the UNGCC from flying away. Then, the various weapons fire on Godzilla, who slowly melts away, leaving Tokyo irradiated for the rest of time. Or so we would believe, until it suddenly goes away and the smaller Godzilla is reborn as the new King of the Monsters, signifying a new era.

Ifukube, when composing this, said he wrote the final song “as if he were writing the theme to his own death.”

This would have been it for Godzilla, but Hollywood started making new movies and that’s how we got to where we are. Did this movie make me cry? Oh man, you know it. You can make fun of these dumb movies with their rubber suits, but if you grew up with Godzilla and had such a worship of him in your young years, seeing him as someone who could defend you when things were dark, then even in your old age, the close of this film is beyond emotional. You are watching a best friend die.

Congo will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s 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.

The debut movie of Anthony Waller, who would go on to make An American Werewolf In Paris, Mute Witness is the story of Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), a make-up artist working on a slasher movie in Moscow that is directed by Andy Clark (Evan Richards). She knows him, as he’s the boyfriend of her sister Karen (Fay Ripley).

What she does not know is that there’s also an adult movie being shot on the same set at night and it’s not just a pornographic film, it’s also a snuff movie.

She’s chased by the killer, Arkadi (Igor Volkov) and the director, Lyosha (Sergei Karlenkov), forcing her to jump out a window. Her sister arrives to save her and Lyosha acts like he happened on this accident.

After the police arrive, Billy is able to communicate that she’s seen a killing. They use her special effects to tell the authorities that it was all for a movie. Meanwhile, Arkadi is disposing of the woman’s body in an incinerator and a man known only as The Reaper (referred to as a special guest, we’ll get to that soon) shows up to make sure everything has proceeded properly.

Luckily for Billy, she’s protected by Detective Aleksander Larsen (Oleg Yankovsky), a Moscow cop who has been after this snuff film crew. Not that Billy can’t protect herself, as she throws a hairdryer into a bathtub to take out the director. But can Larsen be trusted? And why does The reaper think she has a disk that has all the information the police need to stop him?

Roger Ebert compared this movie to Halloween and Blood Simple. That’s how good it is. I wish it’s director didn’t get stuck with such a bad movie to make once he got to Hollywood.

As for The Reaper, that’s Alec Guinness. His cameo was filmed nearly a decade before this movie, as Waller worked with him on a commercial. The actor asked for no money, which ended up being one of his final roles. All that he asked was that he not be credited in the film and there be no press surrounding his involvement in it. That’s why The Reaper is played by Mystery Guest Star.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this movie has a 4K restoration approved by director Anthony Waller, who also has a commentary track. There’s a second commentary with production designer Matthias Kammermeier and composer Wilbert Hirsch, moderated by critic Lee Gambin. Plus, there’s visual essays by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Chris Alexander; the Snuff Movie presentation used to get investors; original location scouting footage; original footage with Alec Guinness, filmed a decade earlier than the rest of the movie; a teaser trailer; a trailer; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michelle Kisner.

You can order this from MVD.

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.

Shot on Super 8, this film tells the story of how PR exec Jim Matthews (David Rommel) tries to leave his wife, genetic designer Meredith Weaver (Anna Zizzo) for his secretary Jenny Dole (Joan Dinco). His wife doses him with her latest experiment, which causes his extremities that start thinking on their own and destroying his mind. Yes, his hands, his arms, his legs, even his cock all can move away from his body to kill and feed, kind of like a demented version of the Myron Fass Captain Marvel that split. into different parts.

Directed and written by Tom Berna (his only film, however he has acted and provided special effects for several others), Colony Mutation has great acting from Rommel and the relationship between Meredith and her sister Suzanne (Susan L. Cane) feels authentic. How strange that a body horror film is mostly about the human emotions of a marriage being destroyed and a woman falling in love with a man who is already taken.

That said, it’s as dark as dark gets and the special effects are the result of the beyond microbudget. But who cares when the idea is this good? Where else would you get a movie with a killer penis and a man who no longer can control his body because he couldn’t control his body? Milwaukee, Wisconsin was far from Hollywood and films made like this are the last bastion of what regional filmmaking was, grimy and rough blasts of unreality that infect our brains.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Witch Academy aired on USA Up All Night on June 18, 1994; January 27 and November 11, 1996; June 28, 1996; March 29 and November 21, 1997.

Did you watch Evil Toons and say, “I want a movie somehow even worse than this without Madison Stone to make up for the abject boredom that I felt while watching it?”

Good news! Or, well, horrible news.

Mark Thomas McGee, who wrote Equinox, wrote this for director Fred Olen Rey. It has Ruth Collins — yes, Bubbles from Firehouse and Tina from Doom Asylum — in it, as well as Veronica Carothers (who played two different roles in Vice Academy 3 and 4), scream queen Michelle Bauer and Priscilla Barnes, who was once Felix Leiter’s dead wife in Licence to Kill. You may know her from getting killed in Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Or maybe you remember her more fondly — and more alive — as Nurse Terri who replaced Suzanne Sommers on Three’s Company.  And oh hell, let’s throw in Suzanna Agar (Shock ‘Em Dead, Evil Toons).

Playing Satan? Robert Vaughn who, as we all know, deserves better. So did Gary Graver, who shot this a decade after Orson Welles died and so did his dream of making a completed movie with him.

If you want to watch women paddle one another and somehow see what should be something every red blooded American boy — and hey girls too, the world is robust and filled with all manner of people and we love them all — should adore rendered into sheer boredom, then by all means, seek out this fecund steaming pile of trash.