When someone tells you that The Blair Witch Project was the first found footage movie, they weren’t even the first in the 90s.

A parapsychology professor, his students and a psychic have locked themselves in the haunted Smith Garrett Building or Strawberry Estates. It’s one of the greatest challenges of psychics and parapsychologists and has become legendary. That’s because this is a place that really is packed with evil and there’s no way anyone is making it out alive.

The 1997 version had a different cast, which included Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause, but director and writer Ron Bonk went back and shot all of that all over again.

It’s long, there’s a lot of talking — I enjoyed the faith discussions more than you may — and there could be a lot of fat trimmed, but when it works, it works.

As you may know, I dislike most found footage movies, so the fact that I finished this 100-minute-long film speaks to the fact that it has something going for it.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from SRS.

The first time I wrestled in Japan, I took a handful of sleeping pills on a 19-hour flight and they never really kicked in, fighting in my gut with a glass bottle of Thailand Red Bull which laughs at that skinny can we have here and I was caught in a world between sleep and awake, knowing where I was but feeling like someone else was dragging me through airport lobbies, subway stations packed with singsong teenage girls trying to get dogs adopted and endless walking through the unfamiliar streets of Osaka until we ended at the Arrow Hotel, a place with a BGM button in my small room that only played two songs — the themes from The Godfather and Midnight Cowboy — and a TV that only played bukkake porn that had pixelated genitalia all static shafts spraying all over a woman whose face was anything but hidden.

Sixteen Tongues starts there and goes even further, giving me flashbacks that shock me into unreality, like at the end of Altered States when people start to de-evolve into VHS tracking noise before we knew what that was.

Director and writer Scooter McCrae creates worlds filled with menace and carnal overload and never more than this movie, a hotel where you have to pay to shut off the endless penetration on the TVs that never shut down, can never be unplugged, that just fluff you until you remember those screaming moments of first puberty overwhelming need with the adult realization that there’s truly nowhere to gain relief.

I always loved the Dark Brothers because back in the letters pages of Hustler people were enraged that someone had the effrontery to make a dirty movie that was nearly impossible to climax to. How dare someone put art in my smut? Or, in the case of this movie, smut in my art?

Adrian Torque (Crawford James, who improbably also played a cop on iCarly, so he’s done the alpha and omega of being a police officer on film, one supposes; he was also a security guard in The 6th Day) survived a bomb blast but maybe his mind and body didn’t. He has the sixteen tongues of everyone who died around him grafted to his skin and he can feel them all screaming inside his mind.

Ginny Chin-Chin (Jane Chase) is a cyborg good at making love and taking lives. She’s in a constant state of arousal thanks to the mad scientist she dreams of killing, a man who implanted a clitoris inside each of her eyes. Her lover — who hasn’t given her much in the way of relief in some time or maybe just days, who can even know — Alik Silens (Alice Liu) is a hacker obsessed with finding the man who killed her brother.

You know how everyone was making future tech movies in the 90s and 2000s and all of it felt dated instantly? When so many people filmed Phillip K. Dick movies and referenced William Gibson? Sixteen Tongues is at once the film they wanted to make and never could because sex is worse than death. For all everyone refers to movies as being like Cronenberg, I’m more amazed by this movie which is its own genre, its own world, its own influence.

I’ve read that this was based on the Merle Travis song “Sixteen Tons,” which goes “Some people say a man is made outta mud, a poor man’s made outta muscle and blood. Muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong.” The song came from the writer’s life, as his brother wrote to him and remarked, “You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt” while his coal miner father often would state, “I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store.” It’s a catchy song that’s fun to sing until you realize all these men were under the Earth digging and dying.

Also: Stark Raven from Shatter Dead showing up as a nun in latex, a character named Mistress Mummy and Tina Krause playing “Bear Handler” and sings you into seeing her dancing bear.

You can get this from Saturn’s Core, a Vinegar Syndrome partner label.

Made just four months after the tragedy at Columbine High School, Duck! The Carbine High Massacre was made by William Helfire, who was on painkillers due to cancer pain, and Joey Smack on consumer-grade VHS cameras, a broadcast Super VHS camcorder, a standard handheld RCA and another unidentified camcorder for $3,000.

Hellfire said, “Like I don’t remember most of Duck!, I don’t remember…I shot all these films in a semi-subconscious, drugged-out, zombified state. I had no remorse nor regard for anything.”

Derwin (Hellfire) and Derick (Smack) are the not-so-disguised movie versions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the real killers. These guys are trying to buy missiles with credit cards and get an idea to blow up the school from what may be an alien janitor.

Erin Brown — also known as Misty Mundae — explained why this movie was filmed by saying, “When those two kids snapped at Columbine High everyone in the Factory — Factory 2000 is the studio of sorts that Hellfire and Smack ran — was walking on clouds, excited, asking ourselves “Is this the shape of things to come? Is the machine finally breaking down to the point where our youth is beginning to exterminate each other at puberty?” We felt before it could be made into some All-American “family values” propaganda TV movie mini-series, we would produce it from the killers’ perspective and, of course, add the Factory’s manifesto into their logic. Everyone involved had found high school a tortuous and stifling environment so it wasn’t very difficult to imagine why the incident occurred. Then to see it replayed on the news again and again made the incident a prime target. The final outcome is a wonderful gut-splitting social satire.”

The scene where her Bible girl character is killed was so divisive that the cast and crew threatened to walk, thinking that the film had gone too far.

Speaking of going too far, Smack and William Hellfire were arrested for carrying real weapons on the grounds of an elementary school months after the shooting as the police ordered a copy of the film online. According to Hellfire, “The FBI was involved and discouraged any action noting it was only a movie’ but the local Ringwood police really wanted to get on TV. They were laughing and telling me not to worry that I was gonna be famous’ Judge laughed it out of court. We made the news for like two weeks straight. Nancy Grace made nasty faces at us. Fox News called us copy cat killers.”

For two guys who mainly made fetish-oriented horror movies for W.A.V.E Productions, this movie has a really heavy weight at the end as the two killers take one another out to escape this world. Now, I think this is a horribly made movie that is packed with too much filler and the aims of being edgy just to be edgy, yet there are also valid points made that high school doesn’t work and actually causes these events or at least doesn’t help the souls who short circuit and take out people.

You can be angry that this movie exists or you can be mad that 24 days into 2023, when I’m writng this, there have already been 36 mass shootings and not a single one, no hopes and prayers, have done anything to push people to come up with a solution or halt the raging erection that so many Americans have for owning guns.

Also: If exploitation cinema offends you, isn’t it doing it’s job?

You can get the Saturn’s Core blu ray of this movie from Vinegar Syndrome. You can also download it from the Internet Archive.

No, not Detroit Rock City. Detroit Rock Movie was shot on video because filmmaker Benjamin Hernandez, said “We were kind of rushing to make that movie because we all felt that this whole garage-rock thing was about to become played out and this was going to fade. Amusingly enough, now people are starting to notice.”

Bands and personalities like 2 Star Tabernacle, the Volebeats, Brendan Benson and the White Stripes, the band most associated with the garage sound of 2000s Detroit, are all shown performing and then speaking right from the places where they live and practice. Sometimes, those are the same places.

Hernandez also appears in the White Stripes’ video for “Candy Coloured Blues.”

The quality of this is, as you can imagine, rough as it was shot on video, yet it’s a vital document of a scene that had not broken out and become something bigger. This was before the time that people even knew that Jack and Meg weren’t brother and sister, so it’s a way different era.

Depending on how much you like this time and music, you can check it out for yourself on the. Internet Archive.