Also known as Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Sex Attraction and Poison, this stars Kari Wuhrer, who from 1988-1989 was the it girl on MTV’s Remote Control (but not the first or the last; the show has Marisol Massey in season 1, Wuhrer was replaced by Alicia Coppola and the last episodes had Susan Ashley in the role). By 1999, she’d been on the Swamp Thing TV show and appeared in several horror movies. By the time she was added to the cast of Sliders and had an album on Rick Rubin’s American Records, Shiny, she was at the top of the world.

This led to a disaster of an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s first talk show. It started when she insulted comedian Stephen Wright, and it only got worse from there.

She’s still acting — doing voice work often — but she never achieved those heights of the late 90s again, where man’s magazines like FHM and Maxim — remember those? — fawned over her. And hey, she’s in many of my favorite movies of that era, like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. But after that? The Prophecy sequels, the Hitcher sequels, movies where she fights spiders and erotic thrillers.

Yes, back in 2000, this was a viable career path. If you had the internet, you had dial-up. Cable and video store softcore was still a thing.

Wuhrer is Ann Stewart, whose husband, Chris (Larry Poindexter), has burned out at work. When he doesn’t get the promotion he feels he is owed, well, he kills himself. Am I supposed to be like the kids and say he unlived himself? And this is after she slept with an old man named Ian McMillan (Michael Cavanaugh) just to ensure that he finally made a sale!

After her husband drives his car off the road to Deathsville, she becomes Anna Johnson and takes over as the live-in au pair for Nicole Garrett (Barbara Crampton), the woman who took her husband’s promotion. Will she turn daughter Darla (Melissa Stone) against her mother? Well, that’s already been done, but yes, she does. She also scuffs her knees in the laundry room pleasuring teen son David (Seth Adam Jones) and has her sights set on husband Scott (Jeff Trachta). Yes, if she has to sleep with every member of the family to get revenge, she will. After all, she had already killed the big boss, Mr. Slider (John Henry Richardson).

Even the way that she got this job comes from revenge. Ann wanted to kill Nicole and accidentally murdered their housekeeper, Karina (Peggy Trentini). This creates a job opening and a way for her to get close to her enemy, who doesn’t even know she is one.

Jay Andrews directed this, but come on, that’s Jim Wynorski, the same as co-writer Noble Henry. He’s joined by writers Sean O’Bannon (Mom’s Outta Site and Mom, Can I Keep Her?) and Al Sophianopoulos, who also write Interlocked: Thrilled to Death. I could be convinced that he’s also Wynorski. Just like the Giallo that inspired these erotic thrillers, they have filmmakers who have plenty of other names and come in so many titles.

And that’s why I already reviewed this as Thy Neighbor’s Wife. 

However, I am not sad. Why wouldn’t I want to watch Kari Wuhrer and Barbara Crampton fight one another one more time? Isn’t that one of life’s simplest pleasures?

Maybe Ann/Anna did Nicole a favor. The last housekeeper, Karina, was about to bone out Scott. Perhaps these two women are close to being one another, and it will take a near-death experience to finally understand her daughter, who is a vacuous cipher of a character.

This is the movie your grandmother would have bought you for Christmas if you asked for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. She would say, “I don’t know all those erotic thrillers you kids are into today.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this Saturday, January 11 at 7 p.m. at the Sie Film Center in Denver, CO. (tickets here). It will be hosted by Keith Garcia, Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Valentine is a post-Scream slasher that feels closer to a giallo than an American slasher at times, with elaborate death sequences and a masked killer who wears the face of Cupid. It’s packed with the hottest actors of the early 2000’s and directed by Australian Jamie Blanks, who also made Urban Legend and remade Long Weekend in 2008.

The movie starts at a St. Valentine’s Day dance in 1988. Jeremy Melton, the school geek, asks four different girls to dance. Three of them — Shelley, Lily and Paige — instantly reject him while Kate at least gives him a break and says, “Maybe later.”

He finally hooks up with Dorothy, an overweight girl, and they make out in the bleachers. A bully finds them and everyone starts to laugh at the two of them until she claims that he is raping her. This removes Jeremy from school and their lives.

One by one, these girls are stalked and killed. Shelley is now Katherine Heigl and a UCLA med student. After getting a Valentine in her locker, a killer in a trench coat and Cupid mask stalks her and slices her throat. As she dies, his nose begins to bleed. I’m assuming that the people who made this hoped that none of us had ever seen Alone in the Dark.

At her funeral, Kate (Marley Shelton, Grindhouse), Lily (Jessica Cauffiel, Legally Blonde), Paige (Denise Richards), and Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw, daughter of Kate) are questioned by the police. They all get the same Valentines, like the one Dorothy gets that goes so far as to say, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, They’ll need dental records to identify you.” She’s no longer heavy and is part of the in crowd, with a boyfriend named Campbell — who may or may not be a con artist but is definitely a giallo-style red herring.

Lily gets chocolates, but they’re filled with maggots. And at the exhibit of Lily’s boyfriend Max (Johnny Whitworth, AJ from Empire Records), Lily is chased by the killer through the exhibits until she is shot multiple times with arrows — ala the real Saint Valentine — and falls to her death inside a dumpster.

They all realize that the initials on the cars are JM, which means that the killer could be Jeremy Melton. Dorothy admits her lie that sent Jeremy to reform school. It’s at this point that the lead cop, Detective Leon Vaughn (Fulvio Cecere, whose movie 350 Days is all about the life of a pro wrestler) hits on Paige and she strongly rebuffs him.

Kate’s neighbor breaks into her apartment as he has been stealing her panties and is killed with an iron. And as Dorothy plans a huge party, Campbell is killed with an ax. Her friends all assume that he has simply dumped her as she’s still the fat girl in their eyes. Of course, if she listened to Ruthie, Campbell’s crazy ex, she’d know the truth. But she gets brutally killed at the party in a kill that’s reminiscent of Deep Red.

At the party itself, Paige is electrocuted in a hot tub and the power cuts out. Dorothy and Kate begin to argue over who the killer’s identity, with Kate saying that its the mysterious Campbell, while Dorothy accuses Adam (David Boreanaz of TV’s Angel), Kate’s alcoholic ne’er do well boyfriend. They then learn that Lily never made it to California and that she may be dead. After a call from Detective Vaughn, they start to investigate further. As they worry about their safety, they try to call him back but get no answer. Suddenly, they hear a ringtone and follow the sound of it until they find his severed head outside the house.

Kate is absolutely convinced that Adam is Jeremy and runs back inside the house to find him waiting for her. He asks her to dance, but she gets freaked out and runs from him — right into the corpses of Paige and Ruthie. That’s when the Cupid killer runs right into her but is shot by Adam. The mask falls off to reveal Dorothy.

Adam finds it in his heart to forgive Kate, explaining how if you have enough childhood trauma, like how Dorothy dealt with the abuse of being overweight, that anger can stay with you and cause violence. They wait for the police to arrive as he embraces her, telling her that he always loved her. She closes her eyes and we notice that his nose has begun to bleed.

There are plenty of red herrings along the way, like Dorothy’s cherub necklace that could point to her as the killer. And then there’s the fact that that necklace really belonged to Ruthie. But after that gets dealt with, it’s pretty obvious who our killer is.

I liked how each of the murders ends up corresponding to the horrible things that the girls said to Jeremy at the dance, like Paige’s claim that she’d “rather be boiled alive” actually ends up happening.

It’s also refreshing that the women in this, by and large, are aware of how men try to use them and respond in modern ways, such as Paige shutting down the main detective.

Valentine isn’t the best movie you’ll watch, but you can get it for $3 at most streaming sites and for around $2 or less at most used DVD stores. That’s a decent enough price to spend — it goes down as easily as a Valentine’s chocolate but won’t stay with you much longer than a summer fling.

Otogirisō wasn’t marketed as a video game but instead a sound novel, today called a visual novel. Koichi Nakamura conceived the title after showing his work on the Dragon Quest games to a girl he was dating. She didn’t understand the game or why people would want to play it, so he decided to make a video game “for people who haven’t played games before.”

Obviously, his work was inspired by another video game that led to a series of better-known games (and movies), Sweet Home. Nakamura said, “The thing that was really interesting about Sweet Home was that it so scary that you didn’t want to continue playing. I wanted to create an experience where the user would be too afraid to press the button to continue the story, too.”

It’s less of a game and more of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel where you make choices at different point as you and your girlfriend Nami survive a car accident and arrive at a mansion. Nobody answers when they ring the bell, so of course they go inside.

If you play emulated games, you can try it out here in English.

Nami Kaizawa (Megumi Okina) has inherited her family’s money and gigantic home, which holds bad memories as her father, who abandoned her. Deciding that she should explore it, she takes her ex-boyfriend Kohei Matsudaira (Yoichiro Saito), who is a fan of her father’s sinister paintings. He has already decided that the house would be perfect for a new video game that he is working on with Nami, so he brings a web camera and sends back footage to his friends and fellow designers Toko Ozeki (Reiko Matsuo) and Soichi Kaizawa (Reiko Matsuo).

The film is not just a video game movie, but literally like a Twitch channel, as we see the designers drawing maps of the house as Nami and Kohei make their way through the secret rooms and keys that you would expect to look for in a game just like this.

Directed by Shimoyama Ten, this has strange multihued visuals that are very 2001, but that’s the joy of it to me. It plays with the idea of what is real and what is the game — like eXistenZ — and has creepy dolls, a frightening caretaker, a heroine with memory lapses and plenty of gore. As I got into other reviews, I couldn’t believe so many people didn’t like it as much as me. Maybe I watching other people enjoy games?

St. John’s Wort is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including commentary by Japanese cinema expert Amber T.; a making of feature; interviews with actors Megumi Okina, Koichiro Saito, Reiko Matsuo and Koji Okura; trailers; TV commercials and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.

Akira Nutahara (Atsuro Watabe) has arrived on Shikoku island to be a schoolteacher. He has fallen in love with Miki (Yûki Amami), an older woman and paper maker who cares for an urn that is said to carry Inugami, a forest wolf spirit. Her family is set to commemorate the 900 Year Rites in which they will celebrate the forest and their past connection to it, as well as the fact that they still own much of the land.

Miki’s family has also guarded these spirits and kept the village safe from nightmares, but with the arrival of Akira, supernatural events have been occurring. After she and Akira have a romantic cave moment, she begins to grow younger and tells the spirit of her mother that she no longer wants the responsibility of keeping the spirits and wants to leave the island with Akira.

It also turns out that due to the curse placed upon the family, they have become intermarried or have to find men that have no idea of what the family must endure. No woman can leave the island and even if they try, they always return. The family patriarch Takanao (Kazuhiro Yamaji) keeps TV and radio away from his family and he is the only person connected to the outside world.

The rest of the village grows angry that there have been several accidents and deaths, which they blame on the family, and prepare to kill them, starting by destroying the studio in which Miki creates her intricate art.

Director Masato Harada has created a gorgeous movie that may not always be horror, but looks at how Japan’s past and superstitions still exist, as well as how family secrets never seem to go away. It’s a slow moving film that demands that you stay with it, but when you get to the scenes where the family goes into the forest and it becomes black and white, your patience will be rewarded.

Inugami is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including audio commentary by Japanese cinema expert Jonathan Clements, an interview with director Masato Harada and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.

Black Serenade sits at the center of what is a slasher and what is giallo. It’s also the name of the masked killer in this film, who has embraced the legend of the Black Tuno, a monstrous being that punishes the stupid. Whoever they are, they have taken that even further and are killing students that cheat or don’t belong in some of Spain’s most well-known colleges.

Thanks to the Villains wiki, I learned that the Tuna is a Spanish fraternity that started when poor students couldn’t afford an education. To get in, they sang and played songs, which made them famous. Soon, rich students who could afford to get in were joining just to be popular and were taking money from people who really deserved it. The Black Tunos killed every one of these false Tunos and as a result were hunted by the Spanish Inquisition. They escaped by creating a secret passageway at the University of Salamanca’s Chapel of Students.

Whoever this killer is, they look incredible, like a giallo villain designed by a Japanese manga artist. They also have a strict code of honor, respecting those they believe are as intelligent as they are, but being brutal to anyone they feel are mentally inferior.

Directed and written by Pedro L. Barbero and Vicente J. Martín, this feels like a Spanish cover of Urban Legend but I didn’t see that as a bad thing. Álex (Silke Hornillos), Trucha (Patxi Freytez), Edu (Jorge Sanz) and Michelle (Rebeca Cobos) are four students who are trying to learn who the killer — also known as the Dark Minstrel — could be and eventually getting threatening text messages from them. Meanwhile, as new murders happen one year after another series of killings, Detective Victor (Fele Martínez) takes on the case.

There are some wild scenes in here, like a drug dealing thinking his blood has become animated as the drugs kick in and he bleeds to death and a series of carvings that point to how the original Black Tuna escaped, symbols that start showing up everywhere the killer appears. There’s also a scene where a cop kills a whole bunch of people in similar costumes to the killer, proving that the giallo police in every country should be defunded and the way that Dr. Loomis wildly shot up Haddonfield have been studied by slasher police departments all over the world.

Originally, this movie was going to be promoted by director, writer, actor and producer Fred Vogel leaving VHS tapes of this movie in random locations around the United States, such as parks and playgrounds. I have no idea what people would think when they saw this.

When he went to Canada to attend the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear in Toronto, Vogel was arrested, pending charges of transporting obscene materials into Canada for having copies of this movie.

That should tell you what you’re getting into.

Peter and his cameraman have a woman named Laura in his basement and they take their time killing her in a found footage kind of way that is never properly framed or filmed, which makes it seem real. There is no joy in what you watch, just a realistic version of what a serial killer’s footage would look like.

Sure, there’s a tour of Roadside America, one of the lost and sadly department parts of Pennsylvania kitsch history, but that’s just a short break before sodomy and hammers to the head dance as partners. Is it for you? I mean, is it for anyone? It definitely feels as real as it gets and I don’t know if that’s something I need to see.

You could also be an edgelord and be like, “I’m cooler than you because I endured this.”

This Unearthed Films blu ray release has extras including an audio commentary by actor/director Fred Vogel and Ulta Violent Magazine‘s Art Ettinger, 10 Questions with Fred Vogel, TOETAG Masterclass: From Storyboard To Screen, an interview with Vogel, three commentary tracks — Vogel, Vogel with Aaron and Ben LeBonte and one by the Killer — a location tour, a photo gallery, trailers and much more. You can get it from MVD.

Diana Collins (A.J. Cook, Criminal Minds) has accidentally unleashed the djinn, who is now played by John Novak. His first movie is to grant the wish of Professor Joel Barash (Sean’s son Jason Connery) and give him a deadly threeway that fulfills two of the needs of the direct to video sequel: blood and boobs.

The djinn wants Diana to be the one to make three wishes and unleash his djinn brothers on the world. Her first wish is given when the djinn makes her friend Anne (Daniella Evangelista) puke her guts out. Instead of watching her friend be in pain, Diana wishes for an end to her suffering.

Her second wish is for the power of St. Michael the Archangel — is he the patron saint of fighting djinn? — and her boyfriend Greg (Tobias Mehler) jumps in the way and becomes St. Michael, who gets all sorts of wild powers like being able to slice off demon hands.

Directed by Chris Angel (who also made the sequels The Fear: Resurrection and Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled) and written by Alex Wright (who directed and wrote The First 9 1/2 Weeks, which is also 9 1/2 Weeks 3 and that would be 66 days x 3 = 198 days; unsurprisingly Malcolm McDowell is in the cast) and credits Peter Atkins (who also knows sequels, as he was the writer of Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III and Hellraiser Bloodline) for the characters he created in the first Wishmaster, this was supposed to have Divoff in the cast as the djinn.

He loved the series so much that he wrote the Y2Ksploitation Wishmaster: The Third Millennium, which started with an American warship getting hit by a Chinese missile and the UN being attacked by demons. When Divoff gave his script to the producers, they turned it down, as it would have been too expensive. When he read Alex Wright’s script, he quit the series.

This film and the fourth were made in 16 days. They took a weekend day off though.

You can watch this on Tubi.