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.

When I spoke to Bret McCormick (who made The Abomination, one of my favorite movies) about Repligator, he said “I was trying to match Roger Corman’s record of five films in one year: in my case it was Takedown, Time Tracers, Bio-Tech Warrior, Repligator and (finally) Rumble In the Streets.

I had challenged Keith Kjornes to write the script in a week. This is what he came up with. Keith was a very talented guy. A funny actor and solid writer. He did an interesting film years later — The Devil’s Tomb with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ron Perlman.

I had absolutely nothing to do with the story other than accepting it. At the time I felt it poked fun at the military in the same way my favorite writer, Terry Southern, had done with Dr. Strangelove. The military, by and large, is headed up by guys who like to destroy things — guys who have society’s approval to be thugs. They take themselves very seriously and I think it’s a good idea to poke fun at them once in a while.

It’s a matter of record that I was eager to walk in Roger’s footsteps back then. This was my attempt to make five films in a single year and to shoot one in four days a la Little Shop of Horrors.”

Shot in 3 days on 35mm film at the Remington York Studio in Irving, Texas — with additional footage shot a year later on 16mm with Gunnar Hansen and Brinke Stevens at Aries Productions in Arlington, Texas to increase the run time — Repligator starts with Dr. Goodbody (Stevens) conducting an experiment of the Sexual Hologram Interface Terminal (S.H.I.T.) that allows her to see the fantasies of Private Libo (James Bock). We see a fantasy of his wife and her friend Buffy, as well as him getting to see Goodbody’s, well, good body. 

Pay attention. While you will see this same exact footage again later, this is the only time that Stevens appears in the movie.

After the opening, Colonel Sanders, Colonel Sergeant (Rocky Patterson (Doc in Nail Gun Massacre, R.O.T.O.R.) and General Mills who have come to witness Dr. Oliver (Kjornes, the writer, writing himself into some exciting moments and proving that movies are awesome) and Dr. Kildare’s (Hansen) machine firsthand. Dr. Fields (Randy Clower, Fatal Justice, Bio-Tech Warrior, Time Tracers) invites himself along, hoping to witness an epic failure and gain Oliver’s funding.

If those names don’t clue you into the feel of this movie, Dr. Laurel Hardy’s (TJ Myers, a former Miss Lubbock Teen Texas USA) will.

The machine they get to check out is an organic digital replication double helix genetic coding scrambler on a 1680 wave link with the maximum thrust at about 40 gig. Yeah, I memorized that. It basically turns men into women. So Dr. Oliver adds his mind control and creates a weapon for the government that sends mind-controlled women after enemies. But when the women go back into the machine for a return trip, they turn into alligator women.

Did Jess Franco steal this for 2012’s Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies?

Also: anyone killed by an alligator turns into a zombie. Sometimes a gay zombie. This movie is in no way concerned with offending anyone or everybody.

Repligator has some music that may seem familiar to you. Well, to me. After all, I watch way too many Andy Sidaris movies. The soundtrack was created by Ron Di Uulio, who wrote the song “Return To Savage Beach” and did the soundtracks for the Sidaris movies Day of the Warrior, The Dallas Connection and Enemy Gold as well as Mountaintop Motel Massacre and Honeymoon Horror.

A lot of the crew also worked on an industrial movie called Risky Business: Employee Violence in the Workplace that I really want to see, hoping that it captures the energy of this.

Repligator sounds and is ridiculous. But so what? The world is a dark and horrible place filled with apathy and soul-crushing failure. This is anything but. It’s a movie dedicated to entertaining you in the short time it had to get made and with the low budget it was given. You’ll remember it long after watching a movie that cost thousands of times what this did.

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.

Ninea Ranks (Keya Smith) entered her life of crime when her man took her on drug deal that fell apart, She hot a man, he went to jail for her where he died and she’s looking for revenge as she leads an all-girl gang made up of T (Tamura Gaston) and Glitter (Dawn Jones).

She’s been going ip against Dion (Tyrone King), who has his own issues with his men Razor (Lewis DaCosta III) and Curtis (Khalid Williams).

This is the kind of movie where every actor was also behind the camera at some point and that it’s mostly the passion project of its director and writer, Randy Williams. It’s taking the 90s gang movie and doing it on the smallest of budgets with a camera that betrays its 1998 origins. And I love it for that. I imagine most of the budget went to Ninea’s wigs, of which there are many.

“Laura non c’è” (“Laura Is Not Here”) was a pop-rock song written and performed by Italian singer Nek. It achieved a huge success in Italy, Europe and Latin America, as well as an entry in the Sanremo Music Festival 1997. It’s about the longing for someone you can no longer connect with and the pain that comes from losing a person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCsq_C47etg

In 1998, director Antonio Bonifacio (Olga O’s Strange Story, Scandal in Black) and writers Gianfranco Clerici (Murder Rock) and Daniele Stroppa (Delitto Passionale) took that song and made a movie out of it.

Lorenzo (Nicholas Rogers) is a comic book artist whose creations seemingly live in his head, as we see action in a bar — man that music sounds a lot like “Smack My Bitch Up” by The Prodigy — that is later realized by his pencil and brushes. He hears an argument outside his apartment — which has more fog in it than Fulci’s Conquest — and saves a girl from three thugs. She’s Laura (Gigliola Aragozzini), the doomed lover of the song, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Every time it seems like Lorenzo is getting close to Laura, she disappears. There’s a moment in a neon cross filled cemetery where she’s visiting the graves of her parents and tells him that she believes in reincarnation. Our comic book protagonist follows her everywhere, even getting kicked out of her apartment by several men, one of them who he thinks is her pimp. He finally succeeds in a night of romance with her, but wakes up to see track marks all over her arms, which causes him to be the one who disappears.

Little did he know that she was a diabetic and that the pimp was her doctor and that the man who kicked her out was her brother (Amadeus, an Italian DJ and television host). He’s told that she’s died from diabetes and that any time he spent with her was probably a fantasy. But oh wow — a cat that he meets on the street is Laura and the entire time, we’ve been in the world of another comic book. And guess who was drawing it? Nek.

The movie closes with Nek and Laura meeting as the song that inspires this movie plays.

This is honestly a strange film. It’s made by filmmakers with a background in giallo — cinematographer Silvano Tessicini shot Murder Rock, Sensazioni d’amore and Luna di sangue — and it has some of that but it’s also a pop song-based movie. I’m kind of amazed that it’s a real movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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Sam Raimi was, at one time, mostly known for horror. Of the novels of Scott B. Smith you would think he’d make a movie of, maybe The Ruins would make more sense. That said, A Simple Plan reminds you that he once lived in the same house as the Coen Brothers when all were new to Hollywood. That said, he makes this movie all his own.

Wright County, Minnesota mostly has a feed mill and lots of snow. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and his wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) are two of the few college-educated people there. Hank’s brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and his friend Lou Chambers (Brent Briscoe) are closer than the two actual brothers are. This is tested when the men find a crashed plane and $4.4 million dollars. Hank wants to turn it in. Jacob and Lou change his mind, saying he should keep it until the snow melts and if no one brings up the money when the plane is found, they can keep it.

They all agree to not discuss the money with anyone except that Hank tells Sarah. She thinks they should take some money back to the plane. On the way, Hank and Jacob are surprised by a farmer on a snow vehicle. In the heat of the moment, they kill him and send his body and vehicle into the icy river.

Sarah believes that the money was a ransom for a kidnapped heiress from Michigan, who was abducted by two brothers by the names of Stephen and Vernon Bokovsky. She tells him that there’s no victim in the crime now, as one of the brothers had to be the dead body in the plane. The plan falls to pieces though when Lou demands his money. He’s been spending too much and might lose his truck. He threatens to go to the cops. Sarah says that they should kill him, a shocking moment as she’s just given birth to their first child.

Sarah says that they should frame Lou for the farmer’s murder by getting him drunk, making him confess and recording it. Jacob is upset that he has to betray his friend and it almost all goes wrong when Lou pulls his gun. It ends up with Lou and his wife Nancy dead and Hank having to spin the story to the police of what exactly happened. The next problem is that Jacob mentioned the plane, so Sheriff Carl Jenkins (Chelcie Ross) makes Hank show him where it is, bringing along FBI agent Neil Baxter (Gary Cole).

This is probably where you should stop reading if you want to watch this movie.

Baxter is, of course, Vernon Bokovsky. Somehow, Hank is able to kill him but now Sheriff Jenkins is also killed. That means that another story has to be told. And that’s when Jacob tells him that he’s tired. He’s either going to kill himself or force his brother to kill him, creating an alibi so that Hank can live free. It turns out that when he tells the story to the real government agents, they tell him all of the money was marked. He burns it in his fireplace, realizing that he will always be haunted by what he has done.

Paxton and Thornton had been scheduled to be in this movie for years. John Boorman was the original director and the film got cancelled. Neither believed they would ever be in the film but luckily, it all came together. This was one of the first movies where Raimi worried more about the performances of his actors instead of the action of the shots.

I miss Bill Paxton. I realize I never knew him outside of the roles he played but I feel like some part of me — I know it’s strange — knew he was a good man. In this, Hank is an ordinary person who somehow becomes a level of evil that he had no idea that he was capable of. Thornton also plays a role that any other actor would treat as a message part. His diminished intelligence is just who he is; he has other smarts that somehow make up for his lack of intelligence.

Lord Doom, evil master of Proyas the Dark Planet, has unleashed Kraa the Sea Monster on Earth. He knocks out a space station to keep the Planet Patrol — who have their own movie a year later — unaware of what he’s doing to our planet. That said, one of the patrol, Mogyar lands in New Jersey, complete with an Italian accent, as he was supposed to go to Italy and work with scientists there to stop the giant monster.

This uses footage from Zarkorr! The Invader and that’s fine, as these movies eventually cross over. Directed by Aaron Osborne and Dave Parker and written by Neal Marshall Stevens, this was also named for a Marvel comic, just like that movie. Zarkorr comes from the Tales of Suspense #35 story “I Accepted the Deadly Challenge of Zarkorr!”Kraa comes from the Tales of Suspense #18 story “Kraa, the Unhuman!”

Mogyar is a clam that speaks with the most racist Italian accent possible. I loved him!

You can watch this on Tubi.

When I spoke to Bret McCormick (who made The Abomination, one of my favorite movies) about Repligator, he said “I was trying to match Roger Corman’s record of five films in one year: in my case it was Takedown, Time Tracers, Bio-Tech Warrior, Repligator and (finally) Rumble In the Streets.

I had challenged Keith Kjornes to write the script in a week. This is what he came up with. Keith was a very talented guy. A funny actor and solid writer. He did an interesting film years later — The Devil’s Tomb with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ron Perlman.

I had absolutely nothing to do with the story other than accepting it. At the time I felt it poked fun at the military in the same way my favorite writer, Terry Southern, had done with Dr. Strangelove. The military, by and large, is headed up by guys who like to destroy things — guys who have society’s approval to be thugs. They take themselves very seriously and I think it’s a good idea to poke fun at them once in a while.

It’s a matter of record that I was eager to walk in Roger’s footsteps back then. This was my attempt to make five films in a single year and to shoot one in four days a la Little Shop of Horrors.”

Shot in 3 days on 35mm film at the Remington York Studio in Irving, Texas — with additional footage shot a year later on 16mm with Gunnar Hansen and Brinke Stevens at Aries Productions in Arlington, Texas to increase the run time — Repligator starts with Dr. Goodbody (Stevens) conducting an experiment of the Sexual Hologram Interface Terminal (S.H.I.T.) that allows her to see the fantasies of Private Libo (James Bock). We see a fantasy of his wife and her friend Buffy, as well as him getting to see Goodbody’s, well, good body. 

Pay attention. While you will see this same exact footage again later, this is the only time that Stevens appears in the movie.

After the opening, Colonel Sanders, Colonel Sergeant (Rocky Patterson (Doc in Nail Gun Massacre, R.O.T.O.R.) and General Mills who have come to witness Dr. Oliver (Kjornes, the writer, writing himself into some exciting moments and proving that movies are awesome) and Dr. Kildare’s (Hansen) machine firsthand. Dr. Fields (Randy Clower, Fatal Justice, Bio-Tech Warrior, Time Tracer) invites himself along, hoping to witness an epic failure and gain Oliver’s funding.

If those names don’t clue you into the feel of this movie, Dr. Laurel Hardy’s (TJ Myers, a former Miss Lubbock Teen Texas USA) will.

The machine they get to check out is an organic digital replication double helix genetic coding scrambler on a 1680 wave link with the maximum thrust at about 40 gig. Yeah, I memorized that. It basically turns men into women. So Dr. Oliver adds his mind control and creates a weapon for the government that sends mind-controlled women after enemies. But when the women go back into the machine for a return trip, they turn into alligator women.

Did Jess Franco steal this for 2012’s Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies?

Also: anyone killed by an alligator turns into a zombie. Sometimes a gay zombie. This movie is in no way concerned with offending anyone or everybody.

Repligator has some music that may seem familiar to you. Well, to me. After all, I watch way too many Andy Sidaris movies. The soundtrack was created by Ron Di Uulio, who wrote the song “Return To Savage Beach” and did the soundtracks for the Sidaris movies Day of the Warrior, The Dallas Connection and Enemy Gold as well as Mountaintop Motel Massacre and Honeymoon Horror.

A lot of the crew also worked on an industrial movie called Risky Business: Employee Violence in the Workplace that I really want to see, hoping that it captures the energy of this.

Repligator sounds and is ridiculous. But so what? The world is a dark and horrible place filled with apathy and soul-crushing failure. This is anything but. It’s a movie dedicated to entertaining you in the short time it had to get made and with the low budget it was given. You’ll remember it long after watching a movie that cost thousands of times what this did.

I’ll come clean — I love this movie and not just because I got to work on this release. Visual Vengeance gives you so much for such a great price. Repligator has a new director-supervised SD master from original master tapes inside a gorgeous limited edition slipcase. There are two commentaries — one from director Bret McCormick and Glen Coburn and the other from Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me — as well as a making of feature, an interview with Bret, a deleted opening scene and new interviews with Bret, Wynn Winberg, Brinke Stevens. Carl Merritt and Randy Clower. You also get the original VHS trailer, a folded mini-poster, “Stick Your Own” VHS stickers, a 2-sided insert and the most important part: X-Ray Specs that allow you to spot your own Repligator. Well, maybe. Anyways, you can get this from MVD.

Let me just let Alvaro Passeri tell you what this movie is about.

“It’s Christmas Eve and the snow is falling gently all around a log cabin. This is the home of Mary. who lives here with her family. She has a serious case of flu and is lying in bed with a very high temperature. Gathered around her is Kevin her young brother. her mother Nancy and her grandfather. Kevin opens the Christmas gifts and finds a book called The Golden Grain He starts to read it. Out in distant space, the Little People’s Castle is threatened by the Black Fortress. ruled by Makeb. The king of the castle calls the Queen of Hope for help. Her name is Jade and when she reaches the Fortress she gets drawn into a dangerous computer game with Makeb. She is attacked on all sides by huge balls of fire. slashing swords. laser rags and a terrible monster. Back at Mary’s house. Jethro, a nasty neighbor, is trying to take the place of Nancy’s husband who is missing, presumed dead. When the game comes to an end Makeb plays the Joker and a flood sweeps Jade away. At the same time Mary’s heart stops beating! Then Jade reappears again alive and well. The death ray hits Makeb. whose mask falls off to reveal the face of Jethro. Jade triumphantly reaches the Castle of the Little People and is presented with a grain of corn as her reward. which begins to glow in the palm of her hand. She throws it and it lands by Mary’s cabin. Suddenly cured. she leaps out of bed. ripping off the scarf around her head, to reveal the face of Jade! At that moment the door opens and Mary’s father comes in. having escaped from a mine he had been trapped in for weeks. At midnight the family gathers around the fire. happy and united once again. It’s going to be a happy Christmas.”

This is literally the description of the movie and it gives most of the film away.

Let me tell you something.

You could be told word for word everything that happens in this movie and in no way will you be ready for it.

This is The NeverEnding Story that I had hoped that movie would be when I saw the trailer as a kid. Alvaro Passeri is the closest director that I’ve ever seen to Luigi Cozzi at his wildest. This is also very The Princess Bride if that movie also had a Satanic figure whose face looks like he came directly out of Ron Ormond’s The Burning Hell.

The first of Passeri’s films I saw was The Mummy Theme Park and this delivers the same delirious world of gigantic factories filled with tiny rooms of drones, all creating death machines, all preparing to fire mind cannons at the Queen of Hope. Yet these are all human beings inside those cubicles from Hell, all moving and living and breathing.

There are puppet people, there’s an entire bar filled with skeletons — and the dog hero also bites one of the leg bones and runs with it — and so much charm. This is a movie that I have run through my head again and again, way more often than movies with budgets thirty times more.

A video game puppet stop motion Christmas movie with an alternate reality inside a book that brings you back to a potential snowbound tragedy. All of Passeri’s movies have a sense of childlike wonder, but they often have eyeballs getting torn out and bodies being destroyed. This one is kid-friendly, even if it might be the oddest movie your children ever see.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Man, more people need to discuss just how much of an influence David Koepp has on pop culture. He wrote I Come In Peace, sure, but he’s also had a string of blockbusters to his credit. Death Becomes Her, the Jurassic Park series, Carlito’s Way, Mission Impossible, Stir of Echoes, Panic Room, Spider-Man, Angels and Demons, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, War of the Worlds and more — that’s a pretty great line-up of work to have on your IMDB.

Atlantic City police detective Rick Santoro (Nicholas Cage) is watching boxing champion Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw) fight Jose Pacifico Ruiz (Adam Flores) with his best friend for life, U.S. Navy Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is also escorting Defense Secretary Charles Kirkland (Joe Fabiani) and arena director Gilbert Powell (John Heard).

At the start of the first round, Kevin is distracted by two women: Serena (Jayne Heitmeyer), a redhead with a ruby ring, and Julia (Carla Gugino), who has a platinum blonde wig on and a white satin suit. As Ruiz scores an upset knockdown, a gunshot is heard. Kirkland falls and Julia is grazed. Kevin kills the sniper and locks down the arena while Julia runs into the casino.

Here’s where the twists begin. The punch was a worked one and the champ took a dive, paid off by the redhead and there was a Palestinian terrorist named Tarik Ben Rabat waiting to kill Kirkland over the U.S. government sending missile systems to Israel. As Julia runs, Rick wants answers and, well, Kevin may want her for other reasons. De Palma gives away the twist early, but to him, this movie was more about the relationship between two friends and how they deal with an event that threatens their friendship.

After a life of doing whatever he wanted, Santoro finally does the right thing and it costs him everything. His family, his career, his friend and even his freedom. But he’s finally free, I guess. It’s a really intriguing hero’s journey.

What I love about Snake Eyes is that it has an uncontrollable narrative set inside controlled studio sets and the Montreal Forum. We don’t get outside until the very end of the movie. As for the closing, it was originally going to end with a tidal wave, but there wasn’t enough money. That said, that unmade ending is referred to throughout this movie.

When a gang of killers named The 7 Spears, led by Akinari Katou, kill an entire convent of nuns — save for seven survivors, led by Ochie (Yuko Moriyama, Moon Over Tao, Zeiram) — who decide to become an army of female ninja, led by a legendary eyepatch wearing samurai named Jubei Yagyu (Hitoshi Ozawa, who literally led them in the film, as he directed and co-wrote it).

There were seven of these movies and this was the first to be imported to the West; as you can imagine it’s somewhat disconcerting but if you love what you see, there’s a lot more to track down and decipher. Such it the path of the otaku; often a path that you walk alone, becoming obsessed with shows and series that go beyond the more popular elements of Japanese pop culture that come to America.

So you can call this Kunoichi Lady Ninja or the very long and much more entertaining title Female Ninjas Magic Chronicles: Legend of Yagyu Part 1.

This is the kind of movie where ninjas pull out their eyeballs to summon demons, where Jubei Yagyu can have sex while deflecting arrows and the lovemaking is so good that he unlocks Nipple Shock Wave kung fu in a lady gifting her with the ability to float and unleash lightning. Also: so many heads explode. Like, this movie is obsessed with heads getting pulled off their body to the point that I was sure that it was either Jimmy Wang Yu or George Lucas directed this.