Released in Italy as Trasgredire, Cheeky! finds Tinto Brass — joined by a writing team that included his wife Carla Cipriani, Nicolaj Pennestri, Silvia Rossi and Massimiliano Zanin — for another trip into his erotic world, a place where the rear end can be viewed as the window to the soul.

Seriously, if you think Andy Sidaris fully realized his world of gorgeous women in a world of spy games, it’s time to watch a Tinto Brass film. This time, he centers his gaze on Carla Burin (Yuliya Mayarchuk), a young woman from Venice who has come to England to be with her boyfriend, Matteo (Jarno Berardi). The only one not happy about that is Matteo, who is continually jealous of her. Perhaps he should be, as nearly everyone wants to be with Carla, including Moira (Francesca Nunzi), the real estate agent who rented her a flat, and her French ex-boyfriend Bernard (Mauro Lorenz).

After making movies like Caligula and Salon Kitty, Brass went in the direction of trying to craft worlds that revolved around young women who almost constantly are nude, like a Milo Manara comic book brought to life.

Brass said his intent with Cheeky! was to advance the cause of feminism through the character of Carla. “She’s a modern woman who is fully aware of her sexuality and sensuality, and of her right to enjoy it without subduing herself to a chauvinist mentality. It’s an old habit, a fixation of mine, a belief that in order to discover women’s lies, all you just have to do is look at their ass. Because, as opposed to the face, which is a hypocrite mask capable of faking and lies, the ass doesn’t lie.”

Only Tinto Brass would make this movie, a film that pretty much is the male gaze 200% of the time and believe that it’s a feminist film. Well, it is a joyous one, as love wins out by the end. Mayarchuk, who Brass discovered working in a pizza shop, is shot in every frame like a goddess, but also a conflicted woman who wants the pleasures of the flesh yet doesn’t want to lose the man she loves.

I never watch one of Brass’ later films and feel gross about it. It feels like a celebration of beauty and young lust. Meanwhile, he’s a dirty old man puffing along on a cigar, shooting this all with his wife by his side.

Cult Epics presents the 4K UHD world premiere of the Uncut and Uncensored version of Cheeky. It has commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nathaniel Thompson, trailers in 4K, an interview with Massimo Di Venanzo, an isolated score by Pino Donaggio, Backstage with Tinto Brass, trailers, a photo gallery, a double-sided sleeve with original uncensored Italian poster art, a 20-page illustrated booklet with liner notes by Eugenio Ercolani and Domenico Monetti and a slipcase. You can order it from MVD.

Directed by Takashi Komatsu and written by Hiroshi Hashimoto based on the book by Osamu Sôda, Persona starts when a student named Danda comes back to school after weeks away. Bullying has kept him from class but now his face hides behind a mask. Soon, many of his fellow oppressed students start to cover their faces, finding freedom in the new identity it gives them, like Tonomura, whose birthday party is a debaucherous orgy of masked teenagers.

Psychiatrist Yuichiro Jonouchi (Ren Osugi) believes that the masks are a change in the way Japanese students will now face the world, while other more cynical voices believe that it’s a way for fashion designer Ken Diamon (Akaji Maro) to sell something beyond clothing, a new look for the Japanese youth market as well as push his masked daughter Hiroko into idol status.

Yuki (Maya Kurosu) and her best friend Ashihara (Yuma Ishigaki) start to investigate this trend and start asking why people feel the need to cover their faces. They even meet the creator of these white face obscuring fashion items, Akira (Tatsuya Fujwara). Their work is noticed by a scandal writer named Yaba (Ikkei Watanabe) who wants to find out why masked teens are being murdered.

Fujiwara and Chiaki Kuriyama, who plays Yuki’s sister Reika, would both be in Battle Royale ain 2000, another film that tries to figure out the Japanese school system and why it’s so filled with bullying and suicide. As for Persona, it feels like part Lynch by way of Japanese by way of teen drama as well as fashion giallo. It’s really fascinating.

Persona is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including an interview with director Takashi Komatsu and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.

Directed by Toshiyuki Mizutani, who wrote it with Mugita Kinosita, this takes place after the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, which saw at least 5,000 deaths. Yukari (Yoshino Kimura) has come to the city of Kobe to help with the rescue efforts.

As a psychic, Yukari can feel the thoughts of others. This isn’t always good, as the violent urges of people disturb her. She meets Chiharo (Yû Kurosawa), who has thirteen different personalities, and who is a loner after her classmates bullied her, blaming her for the drowning — in a toilet! — of a fellow student. When a gym teacher throws her down the steps, putting her in the hospital, Chiharo is still to blame when that man kills himself.

Why does Chiharo have these voices fighting inside her? Is it the abuse of her uncle Tatsurô (Kazuhiro Yamaji)? Or is the out of body experiences that she was forced to undertake from scientist Yayoi Takano (Makiko Watanabe)? Maybe both?

There is a thirteenth personality no one has seen yet, one behind the pain that Chiharo unleashes. That is Isola and she is starting to break through. I’ve always wanted to get into a sensory deprivation tank but after this, maybe I should reconsider.

Isola: Multiple Personality Girl is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including commentary by critics and Japanese cinema experts Jasper Sharp and Amber T., interviews with Yoshino Kimura and Yu Kurosawa, original trailers, TV ads and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by Jenn Upton, who has graciously made a donation and picked this movie. Would you like to have me write about the movie of your choice? It’s simple!

1. Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
2. Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
3. As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
4. For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?

Hubert Selby Jr. had always intended to adapt his novel into a film, as he had written a script years before meeting director Darren Aronofsky, who said, “Anyone that reads Selby’s work can see how intense his world is. He writes the most discordant, angry words that tickle the air with some sweet music around it. It’s an unbelievable experience to read his books. I knew that once I made a larger film it would be very difficult to do a project like this. I live my life not wanting to have any regrets, and I knew that Selby was cool, that he’s a badass.”

Before the movie was made, Jared Leto spent time on the streets and starved himself. The director also asked him and Marlon Wayans to stop having sex and eating sugar so their cravings felt honest. Jennifer Connelley and Ellen Burstyn lived in similar situations to their characters and tried to understand the lives they led.

Burstyn is Sara Goldfarb, a widow who lives with her television, watching it nonstop. Leto is her son Harry, a heroin addict along with Connelley as Marion and Wayans as Tyrone. They sell heroin not just for their own addictions but for the dreams they have, whether that’s to open a fashion store or to escape the ghetto. Sara just wants to be on the TV show she’s obsessed with and begins to diet so she looks good for it. Her friend Rae (Marcia Jean Kurtz) suggests she try diet pills; she’s soon crushing amphetamines to the point that even her junkie son is worried. But all she wants to do is get on that show and impress her friends Rae and Ada (Louise Lasser, the former Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman who once had issues of her own). As the time of the show gets closer, she descends into madness. She imagines her refrigerator is attacking her and a trip to the office of the game show ends with her hospitalized and given electroshock therapy.

Meanwhile, a gang war puts Tyrone in prison and with drugs so much more expensive, Harry tells Marion that she should start doing sex work, even sleeping with her therapist (Sean Gullette). By the time it’s all over, she has a pimp (Keith David), he’s lost his arm from using so much heroin and he and Tyrone are trapped in jail. By the end, everyone is lost, trapped in a fetal position, their only dreams ones that will never come true.

Most movies have 700 cuts for ninety minutes. This has over 2,000 as the quick cutting madness and always in-your-face camera shots are disorienting. Released with no rating, this movie in no way allows its actors to have the old Hollywood addiction cliches. Drugs have never felt this horrible. There’s no fun in any of these highs.

There are some really interesting moments in this. Beyond the influence of Perfect Blue for one of the bathtub scenes, when Sara talks about being old, there’s a second when the camera literally slips away from her. That’s because cinematographer Matthew Libatique had started to cry and fogged up the camera and made that mistake. Despite Aronofsky being upset at the time of shooting, that’s the take in the movie. Also, all of Tappy Tibbons’ dialogue was actor Christopher McDonald improvising.

Aronofsky didn’t want to change the book, as he loved the author’s work. He wasn’t sure if Harry lived or died and had asked Selby about the character’s outcome. The author answered, “Of course, he lives.” When Aronofsky asked why he said that, Selby responded that the character had to suffer more. That may be why the director believes that Tyrone is the only person capable of reclaiming his life. That’s why in the final scene, only he has an actual good thought of someone other than himself. He remembers his mother.

I used to worry that I would run out of berserk Italian movies, especially when the 1990s give way to the 2000s but that shows what I know, because The Mummy Theme Park is one of the most baffling, weird, wonderful and just plain strange movies that I’ve seen.

Alvaro Passeri has only directed five movies*, including Plankton, Flight to Hell, The Golden Grain and Psychovision. His animation skills — he worked on Cinema Paradiso, The Shark Hunter, The Wild Beasts, Atlantis Interceptors and more — really come in handy here because this is a movie that sees its low budget and says, “We can do more.”

An earthquake reveals the underground City of the Dead in Egypt and Sheik El Sahid get the somewhat bright and probably more deranged idea to take all of the mummies and fit them with animatronics and turn them into a Jurassic Park in the sands. He wants it to be a big deal, so he calls over photographer Daniel Flynn (Adam O’Neil) and his co-worker Julie (Holly Laningham) to take photos of the place, which as far as I can tell is one room with mirrors and miniatures and all manner of in-camera and in-post special effects working as hard as they can and then some to make this movie look bigger than it is while also looking cheap while also appearing to be one of the most charming movies I’ve ever seen. It’s neon, it’s glitter, it’s robot mummies, it’s insane.

And yet, this isn’t a movie made goofy on purpose. It’s deliriously sure of itself and yet unaware of what it is at the same time and that’s the combination that I love more than any other when it comes to weird movies.

Can the flash of a camera bring mummies back to life? Are women’s breasts the only thing that can stop them? Will heads get torn off? Will someone puke up everything inside them? Can a chase scene go on forever? Will there be long scenes of fashion that pad the running time? Will there be a model train that goes through a sphinx? Is there also an evil sorceress? Will the sheik’s harem fight against one another and will one of them also be a hologram? Will there be a souvenir shop that has pharaoh heads that spit out beer?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

I mean, this is the kind of movie where a dude gets his head sliced in half and the results look like those cutaway pages in encyclopedias we all used to obsess over. And for that reason and so many others, this is perfect. Man, I’m still processing this movie. I keep reading reviews laughing about how cheap this movie looks and we should be so lucky to have this in our lives.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Under that name, that is. There’s also the rumor that he’s Massimiliano Cerchi, the name under which he’s directed seventeen movies including The Penthouse that came out this year. Unless there are two directors and special effects guys who have the same name and I’ve been surprised before and if you do the math, Cerchi was making those movies when he was eight. IMDB used to have them as the same person and now they’re separated, so perhaps…who can say!?!

Brian De Palma joined this movie after Gore Verbinski. walked away due to c the lack of additional money for the budget. De Palma got that money, which went right into the CGI, but was already written and the film cast. At least Ennio Morricone wrote the music.

American critics hated it — at least Roger Ebert understood the issues, saying “It misses too many of its marks. But it has extraordinary things in it. It’s as if the director, the gifted Brian De Palma, rises to the occasions but the screenplay gives him nothing much to do in between them.” — but they loved it in Europe with Cahiers du cinéma picking it as the fourth-best movie of 2000.

But man, seeing Brian De Palma direct a movie based on a Disney ride is, well, sad. But you know, people need to get paid.

Graham Yost created Justified and wrote Speed, while Jim and John Thomas wrote Predator. I guess that just may absolve them all for this script, which is so talky and full of jargon that I almost didn’t make it through some scenes. I was kept awake by De Palma’s skill as a director.

Set twenty years in the future — which is now three years ago — the Mars I mission, commanded by Luke Graham (Don Cheadle), touches down and immediately runs into a bright white formation in the Cydonia region which ends up killing everyone but the commander. That structure? Oh, you know, the face on Mars.

Mars II becomes Mars Rescue and is made up of Commander Woody Blake (Tim Robbins), his wife Terri Fisher (Connie Neisen), Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) and Phil Ohlmyer (Jerry O’Connell). Their ship is damaged before it even gets near Mars and Woody sacrifices himself to save his crew. They solve a missing DNA helix and soon are admitted inside the face, where they discover that humanoid Martian lifeforms left the planet centuries ago but seeded our planet with their DNA, creating life that could one day make it to Mars.

As the astronauts all escape, the aliens invite them to follow them. Only Jim goes, which makes sense as he’s a widower with nothing left on Earth. Also: Gary Sinise’s eye makeup suggests that he either loves glam or is already part alien.

I loved that the astronauts are blasting “Dance the Night Away” by Van Halen at one point but the whole thing feels at once too long and too short. De Palma did what he could, I think.

The set was 2 million square feet and took 14,000 cans of paint to create. Today, you can see the turning wheel set and the model of the ship while you wait to ride Mission Space at Epcot in Walt Disney World in Orlando.

Also, you have to love this in the credits: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s cooperation and assistance does not reflect an endorsement of the contents of the film or the treatment of the characters depicted therein.