There have been five Killjoy movies. How about that? I mean, who knew?

This poor nerd named Michael just wanted to ask out his friend Jada, who has a gangster boyfriend named Lorenzo, which leads to him getting beaten down, then later shot and killed. Before he died, Michael had been trying to animate a doll named Killjoy.

A year later and Jada has left Lorenzo for another gang member named Jamal yet has never dealt with Michael’s death. And now, Killjoy is real, living inside an ice cream truck and killing off all the members of the gang.

Somehow, Killjoy has merged with Michael’s spirit in order to kill more people and gain power. I mean, he has enough power to get shot multiple times and spit bullets out of his mouth, so there’s that. Only Jada — who loved Michael — can kill this demon by finding the doll and killing it. Yet Killjoy has an entire army of the dead who answer his commands.

You have to love a movie that ends with a guy going under the covers to go down on the film’s heroine and reveals that he’s really a murderous clown.

Ángel Vargas played Killjoy in this first effort, but he declined the sequel Killjoy 2: Deliverance from Evil. Trent Haaga took over the role and would play the part in Killjoy 3, Killjoy Goes to Hell and Killjoy’s Psycho Circus.

Taking inspiration from Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, this one’s all about a gigantic megaplex that has to deal with mysterious happenings on the night of the premiere of the film Midnight Mayhem.

That’s because when the original theater was demolished to build this 26-screen theater, the phantom stayed behind, now haunting this entire film. Perhaps the best part of this is Mickey Rooney as the Movie Mason, an elderly moviegoer whose family opened the original theater. He’s so old that he comes to the theater every day thinking that he works there.

After a career of directing Power Rangers and teen movies like Wish Upon a Star, in which Katherine Heigl and Danielle Harris switch bodies, he pretty much only makes Mormon-themed movies like Meet the Mormons and a TV series based on the Book of Mormon.

For fans of this site, the highlight of this movie is when you can see one of the megaplex screens showing a horror movie called Glimpses of Genevieve which is, of course, Alice, Sweet Alice. I love that one of the most nihilistic movies ever about growing up is in a innocuous Disney film about teens. Stranger still, that film’s director Alfred Sole was the production designer for the Disney films Halloweentown and Halloweentown High.

Yes, after going to space, the Leprechaun ended up in the hood for two whole movies. I can’t believe it myself and I somehow say through both of these affairs.

Mack Daddy O’Nasses (Ice-T) once found the leprechaun’s (Warwick Davis) room full of gold and lived to become a famous record producer as a result. When he refuses to sign some rapping friends named Postmaster P, Stray Bullet and Butch, they steal his magic flute and let the little guy loose.

So how do you beat a leprechaun in the hood? Oh, you know. Just smoke a joint laced with four-leaf clovers. Seriously, I am not making this up.

Also, Coolio is in this. I figured you should know.

Rob Spera, who directed this, also was behind Witchcraft.

When people say, “You really will watch anything,” here’s the proof.

In 2009, director Quentin Tarantino placed JSA amongst his top twenty films since 1992. Directed by Park Chan-wook, who also made Oldboy, this film tells the tale of a fatal shooting within the DMZ that exists between the borders of North and South Korea.

At one point the highest-grossing film in Korean history, JSA is the story of the fragile friendship that starts between four soldiers who are on opposite sides. Yet why did two of the North’s soldiers get killed and why are the stories so inconsistent? That’s what a neutral Swiss team of investigators wants to figure out.

Sergeant Lee Soo-hyeok (Lee Byung-hun, Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies) is a South Korean soldier who has run back to his own country, rescued by his own troops and potentially guilty of shooting three North Korean soldiers, leaving two dead. He claims that he was kidnapped.

One of the dead, Jeong Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) was shot eight times, which doesn’t seem like self-defense. And one of the other South Korean troops, Jeong Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun), suddenly tries to commit suicide.

The truth is that for some time, the men had all been friends. In fact, the surviving soldiers and Woo-jin were attempting to protect one another, something that had been happening since Kyeong-pil and Woo-jin saved Soo-hyeok from one of their land mines.

Yet can even the truth — once discovered — save anyone? This is a tense exploration of the divide that exists between people who are not all that different.

This is a tense watch and one that will anger you by the close. I have no idea how to save the world. All I know is to watch movies.

The Arrow Video release of this film is available from MVD.

Back in the days of buying VHS tenth generation dubs of movies at comic conventions, getting a copy of Versus was a big score. Written, produced and directed by Ryuhei Kitamura (Godzilla: Final Wars, The Midnight Meat Train, No One Lives), it was a non-stop fistfight zombie massacre, the kind of movie you could put on at a party and no one would complain about the subtitles.

Today, twenty years later, there’s nerd rage because Arrow dared to tweak the colors on this blu ray release, even though they worked directly with Kitamura and most of them saw a copy that was either many, many versions removed from an original or saw it streaming. As for me, I’m beyond happy to have an incredible looking version of this movie in my collection.

Originally intended as a sequel to Kitamura’s Down to Hell, instead this became a movie all its own that starts with a story that there are 666 portals on Earth that connect this world to the other side which are concealed from human beings. Somewhere in Japan, there exists the 444th portal known as The Forest of Resurrection, where we see a samurai battle zombies before being killed by an evil priest and his followers.

That brings us to here and now, as two prisoners escape through the forest and meet up with a gang of Yakuzas. Prisoner KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi*, Battlefield Baseball, Deadball, Why Don’t You Play In Hell?) notices that they have a girl — known only as The Girl — kidnapped and decides to kill several of them and escape with her.

The yakuza call for The Man (Hideo Sakaki, Battlefield Baseball, Kamen Rider × Super Sentai × Space Sheriff: Super Hero Taisen Z), who berates them for letting them go. They retaliate by killing him and in turn, he rises from the dead — as do a forest full of their victims — because he and Prisoner KSC2-303 are reincarnations of past lives. The Man plans to sacrifice The Girl to open the portal hidden in The Forest of Resurrection and obtain the power of darkness. He kills Prisoner KSC2-303, but The Girl revives him with her blood.

While he is coming back to life, he learns he was the ally of the samurai we saw die and that The Man and his gang were the evil priests. The Girl was a princess whose blood was the secret to opening the power of darkness, so Prisoner KSC2-303 sacrificed her to save the world, then was killed by The Man.

What follows is the fight to end all fights. Pretty much every action-oriented gunplay film from 2000 on owes something to this movie**, a film so out of control that the two shoot at one another point blank multiple times, their bullets blocking each other every single time.

99 years later, despite the Earth being destroyed, they find one another again. The Man is now the hero, Prisoner KSC2-303 has his gang and The Girl is still alive, telling him that she should have been on his side. With nothing left to blow up, Prisoner KSC2-303 demands another battle. The look on The Girl’s face says it all, because they will fight forever.

Versus at the same time is a wildly original mashup of gunplay, zombies, humor and martial arts while at the same time a homage to The Evil Dead and Highlander. Kitamura says that he was inspired by the films of Sam Raimi, John Carpenter and George Miller.

You have to love a director this in love with film, someone getting high off his own supply, who spent the majority of the film’s budget on food for his cast and crew. You can spot the references — The Frighteners; Predator; The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; The Harder They Come — just as easily as you can see the movies that refer to it afterward.

It’s as close to a perfect movie as you can get.

You can get the new Arrow blu ray release of Versus from MVD. It features a new 2K restoration from original film elements by Arrow Films, approved by the director, of both Versus and the 2004’s Versus Plus, which has ten minutes of new and improved action.

Plus, you get a treasure trove of extras, including Nervous and Nervous 2, two mini-movies showing side stories of other characters in Versus, as well as Versus FF Version, a condensed, 20-minute recut of the film.

This is why they make blu ray. Physical media — even if you’ve bought numerous bootlegs of this film already — forever!

*Sakaguchi claims that he met Kitamura during a street fight that he was involved in. Kitamura offered him a role in his film after asking him if he’d rather fight in the streets or fight in his films. Yes, that sounds like something out of Street Fighter, but it’s supposedly true.

**So do video games. Metal Gear producer-director Hideo Kojima is an extra in this and he picked Kitamura to direct the remake of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, which is full of Versus influence.

The second part of Tomie — the first sequel was the TV version called Tomie: Another Face — this story takes its inspiration from the Basement section of the original manga. It was directed by Fujirō Mitsuishi, with this movie as his only IMDB credit.

It was released on a double bill with Uzumaki, another movie adaption of the manga work of Junji Ito.

At the very beginning of the film, a six-year-old girl is taken into a surgical room where the head of Tomie is found — still alive — inside her stomach. It is placed in the basement and everyone in the room disappears, as the head grows into a full Tomie and starts her spell on a boy named Takeshi.

Meanwhile, the disappearance of the doctors is solved as Tomie’s blood has infected theirs and they’ve all gone insane. Speaking of crazy, Takeshi has already decapitated Tomie in an act of jealousy, watched her regrow that head and he is committed to a mental ward.

The daughter of the head of the hospital — who has also been driven to death by Tomie — is called to the hospital by Tomie, who wants another young boy, Fumihito, to kill her. However, at the last moment, he beheads Tomie instead and they burn her body. Has no one learned anything?

This version, however, looks like a proper horror movie and has a better budget. The idea that Tomie isn’t just some kind of monster, but really an infection, is a much deeper idea.

Remember the 2000 internet? Get ready to relive it in this South Korean slasher, which posits a chatroom meet-up in the sun and fun, where great looking teens who just happen to use the internet — not everyone was on it like this in 2000 and trust me, as someone who did many meet-ups, not everyone was this gorgeous — all get together to have sex and die.

Everyone except for Nam-kyeong is gruesomely murdered by a slasher named Sandmanzz, who has two z’s in his name because he’s either from the streets or this is how we talked in the 2K.

Supposedly, Sandmanz committed suicide when he was kicked out from the chatroom, a subject which has divided the group. Some think that he was ousted for no reason, but most think he had it coming. Regardless, like a cyber Korean I Know What You Did Last Summer, emails start coming from the killer, as do the bodies.

This has seriously the cheeriest soundtrack and the happiest teens ever. And it could have been filmed here and wouldn’t rate a second look, but that fact that it’s been transplanted to the other side of the world is pretty interesting.

You can watch this on Vimeo.