As much as I don’t like the Platinum Dunes era of remakes, I can admit that Marcus Nispel* is a good director and that it was cool that Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel served as co-producers, Daniel Pearl returned to be the cinematographer and John Larroquette reprised narration duties.

A significant difference is that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre only hints at the gore that the Sawyer family inflicts. Here. bodies are slashed in half, people live agonizing moments after being impaled on hooks, faces get torn off and even Leatherface loses an arm.

August 18, 1973. Erin (Jessica Biel), Kemper (Eric Balfour), Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), Andy (Mike Vogel) and Pepper (Erica Leerhsen) have just bought two pounds of weed in Mexico and are on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert when they make the same mistake as another set of teens by picking up a hitchhiker. However, this one is in shock and eventually pulls a gun from between her legs and blows her brains out.

That’s when this movie hit me in the face, as it slow motion had smoke coming from her mouth and pushed the camera out of the bloody hole in the back of their car. That blood, that broken glass, that death — they are no longer in our world of reality but trapped in the deepest, darkest and deadliest place in America.

Welcome to Texas.

Instead of giving us killers to identify with — or sympathize with, as other films in this series seem to do — Leatherface and the Sawyer clan are brutal and uncompromising killers who take what they want and operate with ruthless efficiency.

Meanwhile, this film looks absolutely stunning, with sweeping camera moves and what is probably the best use of the 2000s gunmetal blue color palette I’ve seen. Other movies try and fail at what this film does so well.

Plus, R. Lee Ermey seems to be having a blast here.

Here’s to growing up and giving movies a chance beyond casual dismissal.

*To the director’s credit, he was against the idea of remaking the film and said that it was blasphemy to his longtime director of photography, Daniel Pearl. Pearl, however, had shot the original movie and wanted Nispel to direct the film so that he could start and end his career with the same movie. He also realized that if he just copied the original movie shot-for-shot, there was no reason to make this movie. So, he shot it like a traditional movie, not a documentary.

How weird is it that Pearl shot Chainsaw and Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Butterfly” for Mariah Carey?

The Arrow Video release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a 4K (2160p) Ultra HD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible), along with extras such as brand new audio commentary with Dread Central co-founder Steve “Uncle Creepy” Barton and co-host of The Spooky Picture Show podcast Chris MacGibbon; archival audio commentary with director Marcus Nispel, producer Michael Bay, executive producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form and New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye; a third audio commentary with Marcus Nispel, director of photography Daniel Pearl, production designer Greg Blair, art director Scott Gallager, sound supervisor Trevor Jolly and composer Steve Jablonsky and a fourth with Marcus Nispel, Michael Bay, writer Scott Kosar, Brad Fuller, Andrew Form and actors Jessica Biel, Erica Leerhsen, Eric Balfour Jonathan Tucker, Mike Vogel and Andrew Bryniarski. There are also new interviews with Nispel, Pearl, Brett Wagner, makeup effects artist Scott Stoddard, and composer Steve Jablonsky; a making of doc; a feature on Ed Gein; a feature on the cut scenes as well as deleted scenes, including an alternate opening and ending; screen tests for Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour and Erica Leerhsen; a behind-the-scenes featurette; cast and crew interviews; theatrical trailers and TV commercials;  and cncept art galleries. It all comes inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Aaron Lea, along with a double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Aaron Lea and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Gingold.

You can order it from MVD.

The tenth movie, co-directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, this is the story of Big (Andy Lau), a man who has become a bodybuilder and exotic dancer after turning his back on his life as a Buddhist monk when he was overcome by his ability to see past lives and how karma can play into peoples’ current existence. After he meets a cop named Lee Fung-yee (Cecilia Cheung), he decides to use his ability to help her solve a murder but worries that he will see too much when he looks into her many lives.

In Love On a Diet, Lau wore a suit to look overweight. Here, he has on a muscle suit that makes him look filled with growth hormone. Yet once you get past that special effect, this is quite a special film that presents the nature of karma and that we must come to terms with not only the path in this life but in all of our former lives to achieve balance. If this were a Western film, the end of the movie would not be so upsetting and put Big through so much, yet it is through this journey that he finally finds peace and gets past the artificial world that he now lives in, a place where he tries to forget all that he can see and do. That said, when this was released in mainland China, it was cut to pieces and lost much of what makes it perfect.

Available for the first time on Blu-ray outside of Asia, this Eureka! release has extras such as a limited edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Time Tomorrow; two audio commentary tracks (one by East Asian film experts Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto and another by Djeng going it alone); a new interview with Gary Bettinson, editor-in-chief of Asian Cinema Journal; a making-of featurette; a trailer and a collector’s booklet featuring a new essay by David West of NEO Magazine. You can order Running On Karma from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this film on January 27 at 7:00 PM PT at Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, CA. For more information, visit Cinematic Void. For tickets, visit this site.

Wikipedia refers to this movie as an “American psychological thriller film,” while it was sold as a detective story and derided by critics as an erotic thriller. You know what that means: it’s a giallo.

It’s also way more profound than anyone gave it credit for.

Its heroine, Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), is a complete and rich character, at once introverted and attracted to danger. The New York City that she lives in is also filled with both violence and sex, even in her students. One of them, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), believes that John Wayne Gacy wasn’t guilty of his crimes because he was a victim of desire. Moments later, Frannie watches a couple engaged in oral sex in public. And on the subway, every ad seems to be a poem written directly to her.

That violence gets close, so close, to her that a severed limb is found in her garden. That’s when the men — and police — intrude on her life. Detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is so forward when he questions her that she’s excited by him. Yet, as animalistic as he seems, he feels nobler than the others, like his partner Richard Rodriguez (Nick Damici), who isn’t even allowed to carry his gun after trying to kill his wife.

Frannie also notices that Malloy has a 3 of Spades tattoo, which she saw on the man getting pleasured in public. It’s because he’s in a secret society and can’t tell her anymore. Later that night, she’s attacked while walking home and he comes to her rescue. They have sex, and when she wakes up, she realizes that some of her jewelry is missing.

But when going over the details with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Frannie starts to wonder if Malloy is the killer as well as the masked man who stalked her. Her student Cornelius is questioned — his term paper was written in his own blood — and she has to tell her ex, John (Kevin Bacon), that she thinks she’s having panic attacks. It doesn’t let up, as she soon finds the severed head of her sister.

And when Malloy has her jewelry and a key to her sister’s apartment, it all seems to come together. Or does it? Like in all Giallo, can we even trust our narrator?

Jane Campion and Laurie Parker spent five years developing the film. Nicole Kidman also received a producer credit. She was initially cast as Frannie but dropped out after her divorce from Tom Cruise, wanting more time with her children.

I like what Jordan Searles said about the film, as it describes why it works so well for me: “Shots depicting Frannie being watched mainly serve to highlight how women have to navigate the world under the gaze of men. Frannie is always looking over her shoulder, constantly assessing her surroundings. She knows she is being watched, yet continues to pursue pleasure on her own terms. In the end, once Frannie has faced her worst fears, In the Cut rewards that bravery.”

It’s a rare film that can subvert the male gaze without falling into it. It also isn’t afraid to show depictions of sex that don’t seem alien from the early 70s heyday of Italian psychosexual murder films. I always passed on this movie, a victim of how it was sold and reviewed, and now I know I was wrong.

Robert Rodriguez’s 1993 debut El Mariachi was filmed for only $7,000 and has a naive young musician being caught in a deadly case of mistaken identity. It made the director’s career and allowed him to expand the universe in two sequels, which are featured on this Arrow Video box set.

El Mariachi (1992): Made for $7,225,  the original goal for this movie was a Mexico home video release. Columbia Pictures liked the film and bought the American distribution rights, putting $200,000 into the budget to transfer the print to film, remix the sound, and market the film.

El Mariachi (Carlos Gallardo) has come to a border town to be a performer like his father. His guitar case holds, well, a guitar. The problem is that it gets confused with the guitar case full of gun carried by Azul (Reinol Martínez), who is coming to kill a drug lord named Moco (Peter Marquardt).

The guitar player has fallen for the gorgeous Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), a bartender and lover of Moco, who herself is in love with Azul. The multiple twists and identity issues will bring all of them together, ending in blood and bullets.

El Mariachi has been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, who said that it “helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s.” I love how they describe the way that Rodriguez was able to combine genres to create his movie, saying that it merged “the narcotraficante film, a Mexican police genre, and the transnational warrior-action film, itself rooted in Hollywood Westerns.”

It was only the start of the creator’s career.

Desperado (1995): Steve Buscemi tells the story of El Mariachi in a bar, about how a musician with a guitar case filled with guns was out for revenge before waking up the person he’s been telling everyone about. He has a target for revenge, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), who he blames for killing his lover.

Helped by a bookstore owner named Carolina (Salma Hayek), but is nearly killed by Navajas (Danny Trejos), a hitman sent by the Columbians who is soon accidentally killed by Bucho’s men. El Mariachi, in love with Carolina and wanting to protect her, calls in his friends Campa (original El Mariachi Carlos Gallardo) and Quino (Albert Michel Jr.), who kill most of Bucho’s henchmen before discovering that the drug dealer and El Mariachi are brothers.

He gives the dark hero a choice: he can live, if he allows the bad guy to kill his lover. Of course that’s not going to happen.

With small roles for Quentin Tarantino and Cheech Marin, this movie had critic Janet Maslin writing, “Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired.” A lot of people were upset about the violence and thought it was keeping Rodriguez from being the success that he could be.

As for fans of action movies, they had found the perfect union of modern movies and Italian Western sensibilities in Rodriguez. He still did it on a budget — a thousand times what he spent the first time, but less than Hollywood usually spends — which led Banderas to say, “It was crazy. We did a movie with practically no money. We did a movie with $3 million. For an action movie, that’s practically nothing. There was a guy in the movie, a stunt guy, that I kill, like, nine times. I killed the guy with beard, without a beard, with a mustache, with blond hair, with glasses, without glasses. I mean, I think the guy who made the most money in the movie, was the stunt guy.”

Once Upon a Time In Mexico (2003): A lot has happened since the last movie. El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) and his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek) had a battle against General Emiliano Marquez (Gerardo Vigil) that ended up with him eventually killing her and their daughter. Now, Marquez is working for drug boss Armando Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to kill the President of Mexico.

CIA officer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands (Johnny Depp) gets El Mariachi and FBI agent Jorge Ramirez (Rubén Blades), whose partner Archuleta was killed by Barillo, along with AFN operative Ajedrez (Eva Mendez) to stop the drug kingpin.

There’s also a plan to use Billy Chambers’ (Mickey Rourke) chihuahua to record Barillo, Danny Trejo as another henchman in a Rodriguez movie, El Mariachi’s friends Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi) coming to help, Sands having his eyes drilled out but still being a killing machine and Rodriguez making his version of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which upset some as El Mariachi becomes a minor character in a movie most figured would make him the star.

Roger Ebert understood, as he said, “Like Leone’s movie, the Rodriguez epic is more interested in the moment, in great shots, in surprises and ironic reversals and closeups of sweaty faces, than in a coherent story.”

It’s a big mess, but I mean that in the greatest of ways. It’s also the first of many movies that Rodriguez shot digitally, which allowed him to do things on budget despite the challenges of trying to get so many FX shots and even not having real guns for the first two weeks of shooting.

The Arrow Video set includes high definition blu ray presentations of all three films and a 4K UHD version of Desperado. It has an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Carlos Aguilar and Nicholas Clement, reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper, double sided posters featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper and a collectible poster featuring Robert Rodriguez’s original poster concept for El Mariachi.

El Mariachi has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; an interview with Carlos Gallardo; The Music of El Mariachi, a newly produced featurette on the music in the film, featuring interviews with composers Eric Guthrie, Chris Knudson, Alvaro Rodriguez and Marc Trujillo; Ten Minute Film School; Bedhead, a short from the director; the trailer and a TV commercials.

Desperado has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; Rodriguez; interviews with producer Bill Borden, stunt coordinator Steve Davison and special effects coordinator Bob Shelley; Game Changer, a newly filmed appreciation by filmmaker Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption); Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout, an archive featurette narrated by Rodriguez; a textless opening and trailers.

Once Upon a Time In Mexico has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez, an interview with visual effects editor Ethan Maniquis; deleted scenes; Ten Minute Flick School, Inside Troublemaker Studios, Ten Minute Cooking School, Film is Dead: An Evening with Robert Rodriguez, a presentation by the director given in 2003; features on the Mariachi’s arc and KNB FX and trailers.

You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

First off — this movie was directed Sam Firstenberg. Yes, the same person who directed Revenge of the Ninja, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Ninja 3: The Domination, Riverbend, American Ninja, American Ninja 2, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, American Samurai and so many more amazing films.

What’s wild is that it was written by Samuel Oldham (who edited Cards of Death) and Edward D. Wood Jr.

Yes, that Ed Wood.

Supposedly, there is footage in this of an uncompleted Wood film, Amazon Women from Space, and it’s worked into new things that Firstenberg shot.

On Firstenberg’s old web site, he said the following:

“One day I got a phone call from my friend, scriptwriter Sam Oldham. The excitement and urgency in his voice told me something was up. I felt right away that this call was going to change things for me. And I was right.

Sam is a devoted, if not fanatic, fan of old sci-fi flicks. VHS, DVD, posters, props, magazines, websites, you name it, he loves it. Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Queen of Outer Space, The Creeping Terror — these are the kinds of movies he lives for. When he called me, he was working at one of the small, dingy, forgotten film vaults that exist all over Hollywood. His job was to check the condition of old negatives and prints stored in rusting tin cans, to see if any were worth saving, and catalog them.

You all know of Ed Wood, director of the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, the man who was crowned the worst director of all time, and immortalized in Tim Burton’s movie. Many people are devoted to his work; he is probably the original cult director, and his name is connected to quite a few tacky Hollywood projects. But for many years, rumors have circulated in Hollywood about one last project Ed Wood started but never finished. He either ran out of money or died before it was finished, depending on who tells the story. Ed Wood was so strange that it is not unlikely that such a film, or part of a film, really exists. The supposed title of the lost film was Amazon Women From Outer Space,  definitely a typical Ed Wood title. No one has come up with any evidence to authenticate the rumors, but nevertheless, they keep resurfacing. Not long ago, however, a lost and forgotten Ed Wood script was found and produced — so you see, miracles can sometimes happen. You can imagine the excitement that would be stirred up if any “lost” Ed Wood footage were discovered today.”

Later, he reveals what was found in those vaults.

“He tells me he’s found some reels of celluloid tucked away on a hard-to-reach, cobweb-covered shelf. After running the film through the viewer, he now strongly believes that he has discovered the lost Amazon Women From Outer Space. “And that’s not all!” he says. “There are script pages too, ten or fifteen of them! They were in a paper bag underneath the film cans! This is impossible, but I’ve got it all right here!” He sounded like he was about to leap right through the phone line. “Yeah, right,” I said. I am notoriously skeptical when it comes to sensational information. On the other hand, Sam’s knowledge of sci-fi films is vast. He can recite 20-minute passages from any old horror or sci-fi flick, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was after midnight, but Sam asked me to come down and look at the footage. I found myself twenty minutes later in a pitch-dark, rat-infested alley off Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, knocking at the back door, and soon we were hunched over the viewer, watching the moving images on the small square glass. I am not an expert on old sci-fi flicks, nor on Ed Wood’s filmography, but it struck me immediately that my friend might be right. The yards and yards of unedited material we viewed were so tacky, so ridiculous, and so incoherent, that they definitely had the Ed Wood touch. The footage was full of Amazon-type women running around in skimpy outfits on cheap spaceship sets. But the cans and boxes were not labeled, and the scenes were not slated, so there was no way to determine whether Sam was right. None of the actresses was even remotely familiar either. And the script pages he mentioned? I turned them over in my hands, fearful that they would crumble to dust right then and there. They seemed to correspond to the film images. We knew we had to contact experts in the area immediately, to help us authenticate, recover, and maybe even restore the remnants of the historic Amazon Women From Outer Space.”

Professor Harvey Kirk (David Rabius, who was also in The Girlfriend from Outer Space, which he probably brought up when he auditioned) is a sex addict whose marriage to Barbara (Barbara Sharp, who also produced this and another Oldham-directed movie, Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy: Fallen Idol) is almost finished. She’s trying to set him up by having her friends come on to him and beyond that, he’s being watched by alien women — several are his students — and then they take him to their planet and start using him to populate the race as otherwise, all they will have is more women.

Michael Dorn — Worf! — is a bartender. Once, I saw him at a convention and someone asked him what he liked about being on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He answered that he was happy that he wasn’t playing a cop after a career of playing police officers like Officer Jebediah Turner on CHiPS. The person asking said, “Worf is a security officer, so you’re still a cop.” He was so sad that he just walked off the stage.

The Amazons in this movie are played by Valentina Chepiga, Elise Muller (who was also in Beach Babes from Beyond), Sherry Goggin (an American Gladiators contestant), Jayne Trcka (she’s the most Amazonian of the Amazons in this), Lauren Powers (well, she’s also pretty big), Cynthia Bridges, Brenda Kelly (who is also in another Oldham movie, Close Encounters of the 4th Kind: Infestation from Mars), Timea Majorova (who was in the movie Bigger, Faster. Stronger with Powers), Nicole Rollolazo, Viviana Soldana, Andrulla Blanchette (her IMDB background says that she is the most successful  female British bodybuilder in the world and the only British bodybuilder to win the Ms. Olympia), Elaine Goodlad, Kat Meyers, Gayle Moher and Lena Johanessen.

Back to that Wood footage. Is it real?

Firstenberg said, “The next few weeks were devoted to running the material by authorities on Ed Wood — film historians, directors, sci-fi buffs, and the hard-core sci-fi B-movie geek crowd. This process proved to be an emotional roller coaster for us, and by the end of it, we felt as if we’d been turned inside-out.  As soon as one expert supported the Ed Wood theory, another would dismiss it as preposterous. Sam and I were nervous wrecks.  Did we have something, or didn’t we?

One of the people we approached was a hard-core sci-fi fan, Dr. Elliott Haimoff, Ph.D. A documentary producer, Elliott was so excited when he heard about our discovery, he immediately insisted on joining us on our mission. We decided that the evidence strongly suggested that the footage was, indeed, Ed Wood material, and as a trio of producer, director, and writer, we resolved to rescue and restore the treasure we had found.”

Later, he specifically refers to the footage by saying, “We had our Ed Wood-type movie — the most hideous, ridiculous, campy, tacky sci-fi we ever saw.  It was one ugly baby, worse than Plan 9 — and we were in love with it. The plan was to give it the right exposure, bring it out to the public so the sci-fi crowd could judge it for themselves. But the product was too short, at 62 minutes, and it had no beginning and no end. It was clear that this movie, which we now officially called Amazon Women From Outer Space, was never completed. As exciting as it was, we all felt unsatisfied. Discussing and debating our predicament, we made the decision to go the extra mile and attempt to extend and complete Amazon Women into a 90-minute full feature, with a beginning, middle, and end. It was too good to neglect. Having in our group a writer, a producer, an editor, and myself a director, we were confident that we could pull it off. Sam Oldham bashed out a script utilizing the original pages, first off.  In the revamped story, the Amazon women from outer space realize they need a male in order to ensure the survival of their species, and find the ideal mate on Earth. They kidnap their chosen male, and the story is off and running. With the male at the center of the new script, the title of the new movie became The Interplanetary Surplus Male and the Amazon Women of Outer Space.”

The film seemingly had major issues with the financial backer, as Firstenberg went on to say that they had no money and “the entire cast and crew stayed on and worked for deferred payment in order to complete the 18-day shoot. Miraculously the filming was completed to my satisfaction, using credit cards and other funds our producer scraped together.”

What they had didn’t match, so more reshoots happened — Firstenberg paying for it all, saying, “I’m looking at my wallet, which seems to be getting skinnier and skinnier!” — and there was a plan to “digitally isolate and colorize some of the backgrounds from the old footage, and composite the actors onto the backgrounds.”

In conclusion, Firstenberg said that he was “Maybe I am now a co-director with Ed Wood on a movie, maybe with someone else. In any event, we ended up with a very funny, very campy, very authentic 50’s-style sci-fi spoof. You will not find any continuity or sanity in it, but when you see it, you will be able to experience our sci-fi discovery.”

There was also an official site that is down now, but you can see it thanks to the Internet Archive. One of the anecdotes on the site says, “As for the rumors regarding the connection with Ed Wood and his lost footage……… “No Comment” at this time.”

Regardless, what emerged is a movie that fits into the SOV era in look. In fact, there are scenes where the director speaks to the actors and it feels like everyone is breaking the fourth wall. Or maybe they didn’t feel like editing it. I’d love to talk to Firstenberg about how this was made.

There are negative reviews of this movie online but I found moments of it fascinating. There are several Star Wars references that are explained by the Amazons that at one point, one of them left their planet and went to Earth because she was in love with a human — Queen of Outer Space — and sold all their secrets to Hollywood. In fact, they say that Star Wars was shot on location and that they have been working with Earth’s governments and filmmakers for years so that they can have breeding stock in exchange for technology.

What a strange and wonderful movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

John and Mark Polonia made a slasher with giallo POV moments in which Def Jam comedians are being killed and they’re all friends of Hollaback (Mike Troy Smith), whose career has been ruined by his act and now is getting threatening phone calls.

Just read that sentence again. That’s all you need to know. The idea that this even exists is why I have this website.

Comedians Brooklyn Mike, Kenny Williams, Rob Stapleton, F.O.B, Harris, Mike Yard, Wil Sylvince, Arnold Acevedo, Brad Lowery, Jay Phillips, Kareem,  Jerry Ford are all in this, as well as man on the street style interviews that set up the movie’s premise of dying on stage when you bomb and having to face off with the audience who is there to potentially ruin your act by booing you.

This has some solid gore despite how basement level the budget was but you know, I kind of love that someone decided to make a black comedy slasher. Who would have come up with that?