EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie on July 20, 2020, but now that Mill Creek has released a 20th anniversary edition blu ray, we figured now was a good time to come back to it. 

Two decades after its release, this movie still rings true, a beacon in the world of pop that says so much.

Beyond featuring the film on blu ray, it also comes with commentary by directors Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont and producer Marc Platt, a behind the scenes feature, deleted scenes and music videos for Josie and the Pussycats “3 Small Words” and Dujour’s “Backdoor Lover” and “Around the World.”

You can check out Mill Creek’s information page and order Josie and the Pussycars from Deep Discount. 

Who would expect that a big budget movie based on an Archie Comic and Hanna-Barbera cartoon would end up being a movie so willing to bite the hand that feeds and presents a world where the world of pop music is all one giant conspiracy to sell you things? While it’s selling you things, of course.

Yet despite being savaged by critics back and bombing at the box office at the start of this century, this movie feels more relevant today than nearly anything else that played theaters in 2001. It’s skewering of consumerism is, if anything, even more relevant today. And man, the songs are catchy.

Josie McCoy (Rachael Leigh Cook), Melody Valentine (Tara Reid) and Valerie Brown (Rosario Dawson) are the Pussycats, who have been selected to replace DuJour, the latest and hottest band, but also one who have learned that this is all a big scam on the kids. They pay the price when their plane goes down over Riverdale.

Now, Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming) and Fiona (Parker Posey) have promised the one world government that her new band won’t need to be killed via drug overdose and will get the job done — or else Carson Daly will wipe them out on the set of Total Request Live.

There are so many products placed in this movie that it becomes virtual overload, yet none of them were paid for by the actual companies. They were all placed there by the filmmakers and there are around 73 different products in this movie.

Those songs I mentioned — that’s Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo singing — make this movie even better.

Deborah Kaplan (who is married to Breckin Meyer, who has a cameo in this movie) and Harry Elfont wrote and directed this movie. They’ve worked together on plenty of other films, including A Very Brady Sequel, Can’t Hardly Wait, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Surviving Christmas, Made of Honor and Leap Year. However, this would be the last movie they’d direct.

$la$her$ is a Japanese game show that invites contestants to win millions of dollars if — and that’s a big of — they can survive being hunted down by Preacherman, Chainsaw Charlie and Dr. Ripper. During the show, all crimes are legal, but everyone must remain motionless during commercial breaks.

For the first time ever, the show is inviting six American contestants — Megan, Devon, Michael, Rick, Rebecca and Brenda — each with their own reasons for completing. For example, Megan only wanted to be on the show to protest its existence. Brenda wants to be an actress. Devon is an ex-Marine. Rebecca is an adrenaline junkie who has just learned that she has MS. And it turns out that one of them is the Bible Doll Killer and wants to have a spectacular death.

Looking cheaper than most TV it imitates — they really should have hired some people who have shot pro wrestling to give this the right look — Slashers has a great idea at its heart. If the execution isn’t exactly perfect, well, at least there’s a scene where a man cuts his own head off.

Also known as Vampire Resurrection and appearing as “From the Grave” on the I, Vampire remix anthology, Song of the Vampire not only stars Subspecies heroine Denice Duff, but was directed by her as well.

You may be forgiven if you think it fits into the adventures of Radu Vladislas, but it only uses footage from the third movie. Instead, we meet Jonathan, a man who had to sacrifice his own soul and become a vampire in order to find his true love.

Meanwhile, a beautiful young woman, Victoria Thorn (Denice, of coure) dreams of a past time when she had a great love who was Jonathan. Their souls are forever intertwined, as they say at Hot Topic. Will she become a vampire for him?

Man, what favors or blackmail did they have on Geoffrey Lewis to get him to show up in this movie? I know actors have to work, but wow. And Julie Michaels from Point Break and Roadhouse? Is this the most stars a Full Moon movie has had?

Also — the boom mic shows up repeatedly and I could not be happy to see it getting work.

Mrs. Albright (Elizabeth Ince, Grandmother Regina from Demon Wind and Mrs. Denton in Vice Academy 5) seems like such a sweet lady when she arrives to stay at a boarding house. However, it turns out that she’s a demon who uses desire against the other people staying there, stealing their skin to continue to build her skin suit and trapping their bodies inside a book as if they were paper dolls.

That’s because she’s made a bet with the devil that she can destroy the entire world. As the film ends, it seems like she’s going to make good on that claim.

Written and directed by Neal Marshall Stevens (who has forty-five writing credits at the time this was viewed, including Thir13en Ghosts, Head of the Family and Puppet Master: Axis Termination; he also was a creative consultant on the TV show Monsters), this was the original script for Witchouse, but that changed after the producers decided that they wanted to make a movie closer to Night of the Demons. Also, in true Full Moon style, this was shot on the same set as Ragdoll.

It has plenty of unsettling images — and sound design — in it, the least of which is when Mrs. Albright asks a man to unstitch the skin on her back to reveal her demonic form.

Stitches also is on the Full Moon compilation film Possessed under the title “Witches’ Dolls.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Do you like and/or know who Cradle of Filth is? Then you may/may not care about this movie, which features nearly everyone from the band’s Midian era lineup, as well as placing leader Dani Filth into a role that connects all of the stories.

It was written and directed by Alex Chandon, who had directed the band’s videos for “No Time to Cry” and “Her Ghost in the Fog.”

Things start with The Man (Filth) being attacked by two muggers before he turns things around and kills both of them. The stories are a mixed bag — that’s putting it lightly — generally involving goth-looking girls dying horribly, like a girl who sleeps with The Man and has a monster rip its way out of her womb and kill one of her friends.

Everything and every story is the fault of Kemper, the son of a Satanist who has been using his occult abilities to abduct and kill children while even now continuing his rampage through his son — The Man — from a mental ward.

There’s an amputee who can’t have sex with his wife until he kills his friend and takes his leg. Then his wife dies in a car crash and he kills himself. When the police arrive, The Man kills them both. That’s the whole story of that segment, which feels like an excuse to show amputee sex and the gore of a woman who has gone through a car window.

The cop who is trying to get to Kemper keeps hitting dead ends and even his son is caught up in this, growing obsessed with internet snuff chatrooms and ended up killed in one. He finally makes his way to the sanitarium, but even after he shoots The Man in the head, tentacles emerge from the wounds to end the movie.

You can see the Amicus influence in this, but it’s kinda like a Cradle of Filth song: long, overblown and yet still fun in parts. Your mileage, as they always say, may vary.

Released by Severin Films when they put out their horror anthology documentary Tales of the Uncanny, The Attic Expeditions was a revelation to me. I was knocked out by its Asylum-influenced story of Trevor Blackburn, a man who may or may not have lost his mind.

The problems begin when he and his girlfriend Faith purchase a home together and find a chest in the attic. Inside, they discover a book of black magic that gives them great power through a series of rituals. As they work on learning how to gain more power, a ritual that combines their consciousnesses leads to her death.

Now in an asylum, Dr. Ek (Jeffrey Combs) and Dr. Coffee (Ted Raimi) hope to use the book of black magic to cure all mental illness, but Trevor can barely remember his past and has no idea where it is. Dr. Ek then sends Trevor to be rehabilitated at The House of Love, a recovery facility seemingly in the command of Dr. Thalama (Wendy Robie, The People Under the Stairs) that is really Trevor’s old home. The goal is to make him find the book and use actors, their stories and fake murders to make him wake up and turn over the occult reference.

Dead people come back to life, drugs and surgery are used on our protagonist and all of these things make him go even deeper into fantasy until there are multiple versions of himself and Faith all working on finding the black book.

Originally intended to be the fourth film in the Witchcraft series, this film stands on its own, featuring really good performances — Seth Green is awesome in this — and the only downside is the alt rock soundtrack that was forced on the film by its producers. Sadly, this film — despite being picked up by Blockbuster — doesn’t get the kind of publicity other lesser horror anthologies get.

This movie is made even better by the fact that Alice Cooper shows up.

You can get this from Severin and watch this on Tubi.

A serial killer’s trail of dead bodies leads to the haunting past of two brothers and one woman’s love for both of them. But you know what will make you watch this?

The cast! You’ve got Max Gail, Charles Hallahan, Tippi Hedren and Dennis Christopher, which is way better than you’d expect for a small budget film.

This movie was made at some point in the 90s and wouldn’t be released until 2001. That shouldn’t stop you from watching this, which feels kind of like an American giallo, which is not a bad thing. I mean, a serial killer is taunting a schoolteacher, who has a cop half-brother and a new lover who looks exactly like every one of the victims and his mother, who died mysteriously.

You can get this from Wild Eye Releasing or watch it on Tubi.

Gakuryū Ishii made Burst City and if that were not enough of an attack on the senses, he made this film, the story of Dragon Eye Morrison (Tadanobu Asano, the incredible Kakihara from Ichi the Killer), who was given electroshock therapy as a child which now gives him the ability to conduct electricity, which he sometimes uses in his job as a reptile investigator and guitar player. But now, another man — Thunderbolt Buddha (Masatoshi Nagase, Mystery Train) — also has those powers but uses them to go after gangsters. Inevitably, the two must meet and battle one another.

Most amazingly, this movie is narrated by Masakatsu Funaki, who was the best native star of Pancrase, an early MMA legend and still an active pro wrestler.

A black and white film bursting with attitude, noise and chaos, this is what a comic book film should look like. You know how some movies seem cool? This is what being cool is all about.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

I saw Iron Monkey for the first time during its 2001 U.S. release.

Settling into my seat, I knew relatively nothing about it other than it was considered a modern classic Kung Fu film. When I realized it was about young Wong Fei Hung it was like opening a surprise gift. Being a big fan of Once Upon a Time in China with Jet Li and being familiar with the long, rich cinematic history of the character in HK movies made Iron Monkey even more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise.

I patiently waited for the Wong Fei Hung theme music to kick in. When it never did, I realized it was because the film had been re-scored for the American release. The cinematic equivalent of watching a James Bond film without the classic theme. That being said, the music in this version was actually pretty good when compared with some of the criminal hack jobs Miramax perpetrated on to other Asian films in the ‘90s. Quentin Tarantino’s name in the credits no doubt had something to do with the overall respect shown here. That it was given a wide release in North America with subtitles is a glorious thing.

Iron Monkey tells the story of a Dr. (Yu Rong Guang) who dons a mask during his off-time to steal riches from corrupt village officials and give the money to the poor. When a pre-teen Wong Fei Hung (played in the grand Cantonese tradition by a female – Angie Tsang) and his legendary father Wong Kai-Ying (Donnie Yen) come to town, it makes for one of the best Kung Fu movies I’ve ever seen. Each fight is better than the last and the final battle, which takes place mostly on top of wooden poles over a burning fire is truly a thing of beauty. Younger audiences will be familiar with Donnie’s amazing fighting techniques from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The equally talented Yen Shi-Kwan (Iron Robe Yim from OUATIC) plays the main baddie.

Every time I read a discussion centered on this film, everyone always goes on and on about Yuen Woo-Ping. He is indeed a brilliant artist. However, I feel just as much of the credit for the success of Iron Monkey should go to Producer/Writer Tsui Hark. I have viewed other films from roughly the same time period of both men and have to say that I have consistently enjoyed Tsui Hark’s body of work more than Yuen Woo-Ping’s. Iron Monkey is a great collaboration and should be viewed by all who are even the slightest bit curious about Kung Fu films.