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.

Remember The Parent Trap? Well, this is a reimagining with Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson as Nick Parker and Elizabeth James, a couple that divorced after the birth of their twin daughters, Hallie Parker and Annie James, which seems like a strange way to settle a divorce, but hey, that’s how the story has worked since Erich Kästner wrote Lisa and Lottie.

Nancy Meyers was the right person to create this, as she wrote Father of the Bride and this was the first movie she would direct. It was written by her husband at the time, Charles Shyer, who she worked with on Private Benjamin, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Baby Boom.

There’s a lot in common between the two movies beyond the story itself. Joanna Barnes appears in both films, playing Vicky Robinson in the original and Vicki Blake, the mother of Meredith Blake (Elaine Hendrix), who is the same character she was in her youth. The song “Let’s Get Together” gets sung, the bunkhouse is named Arapahoe and the grandfather has the same smell of tobacco and peppermint.

Hayley Mills would say, “It was so like the one I did, and yet not. But I thought it was really good.”

It makes me feel old to discover that this movie is 25 years old. There will be another remake and I’ll remember all the ones that came before. Lohan is really great in this and it started her career. She’d play twins again in I Know Who Killed Me, but that’s a totally different movie.

Also: the captain of the Queen Elizabeth 2? That’s Dean Cundey.

Show Me Love was originally titled Fucking Åmål in reference to one of its leads, Erin, who yells, “Varför måste vi bo i fucking jävla kuk-Åmål?” (Why do we have to live in fucking bloody cock-Åmål?). As the movie was going to be Swedish entry to the Academy Awards, the country itself wanted the name changed, as did the city, which claimed that the name of the movie would show their town in an unfair light and may even cost their economy. Variety even refused to run ads for it. So Moodysson just took the title of the Robyn song on the soundtrack and gave this movie its new name.

As you can imagine, after its success, Åmål has now embraced the movie and even has a Fucking Åmål Festival.

Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg) and Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) are two students who have different outlooks on life. Agnes has no one close to her and is always depressed, while Elin is surrounded by friends and yet finds her life dull. They start to get to know one another and Elin confesses how trapped their small town makes them so they attempt to leave for Stockholm, but are kicked out of a car when the driver catches their first kiss. Of course, Elin is not sure about this relationship, wondering if she’s meant to be with Johan before realizing that perhaps this love is the one good thing about their small town.

As you’ll discover watching the full career of Moodysson, this coming of age film is just the start of his ability. Ingman Bergman said that this was, “a young master’s first masterpiece.” I’m so excited that I got to watch nearly his entire filmography in one week.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Show Me Love appears as a 2K restoration by the Swedish Film Institute, approved by director Moodysson and cinematographer Ulf Brantå. Extras include new interviews with Moodysoon and Alexandra Dahlström, an appreciation by Dr. Clara Bradbury Rance, author of Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory, a short film named Talk (Bara prata lite), a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.