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 these movies on Tubi: Blood of the Chupacabras and Revenge of the Chupacabras. You can read an interview with the director here and get this on blu ray from Diabolik DVD.

Visual Vengeance has brought back two Blockbuster Video shelf favorites, both concerning the infernal Mexican goatsucker known as el chupacabra! In the book Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, these films are credited with starting the trend in movies about the chupacabras.

Blood of the Chupacabras (2003): If you read any reviews that came out on this movie’s original release, they all decry the fact that the poster and cover art are so amazing and the actual monster is not. But you know, that’s part of the charm in director and writer Jonathan Mumm’s movie (he also edited and composed some of the music).

The town that this takes place in has near Andy Milligan level supernatural coincidences: there’s a witch. There’s an old vampire hunter. There’s a singer. There’s an old prospector! And yes, there’s a chupacabra controlling possessed townsfolk from within a cave.

There are so many people in this town and let me tell you, I kind of love that the majority of this movie is people arguing over rent and trying to figure out how to survive in their downtrodden lives and then realizing, “Oh yeah. There’s a monster that kills goats in a cave.” That’s how real life is. You know that there are so many evil creatures in the woods outside of town but you live in a capitalist society and the cogs of the military-industrial complex are greased in the blood of the working man.

In addition to all of those characters — seriously, if you missed meeting new people in the new COVID era, get ready to meet so many people and then meet some more people — this movie has a synth score that in no way tries to sound real. You may be too young to remember organ stores in the mall and the poor souls that worked there that had to non-stop play synth and organ ditties while we shopped around them. Who were these people buying these gigantic organs? Where was the budget to hire so many people to play them? Where did they all go?

I digress.

I love when people review this movie and say it has so much talking. Yes, it’s a 1950s drive-in movie with no budget shot on video (with some 16mm from the first pass at making it) with rubber suits, early CGI and untrained actors. Revel in it. Soak it up. We should all be so lucky to live in a world that this movie exists and we do.

Revenge of the Chupcacabras (2005): 

Just look at that image of a humanoid chupacabra and remember 2005, a time when life was much, much simpler than today and we had no idea. We could still rent movies in stores. And yeah, things are probably more convenient today, but we also had movies with chupacabras. Two in a row, no less, from Jonathan Mumm, who directed and wrote this.

You know what’s really crazy? This movie isn’t even about a chupacabra. It’s about a kidnapping. A chupacabra shows up — and it looks better than the first movie because people whined that they got a cool looking poster and that monster wasn’t in the movie and have you people never watched an exploitation movie before?!? — but this is really about a kidnapping. I am all for the bait and switch, folks.

Also in 2005, you could kidnap an attractive college student and ask for $2 million and no one laughed at you. Today, we don’t believe in science so we would just giggle and try and negotiate the ransom.

This movie makes me want to love it and as such has a scene where a priest investigates the possessions going on in this small town and gets killed by a chupacabra and honestly, that’s all I want movies to be about.

The tagline is “It can smell your fear.” Can it also smell how happy I am to look over and see this movie on my shelf and be so happy that I own it, much less the gorgeous Visual Vengeance blu ray? You got me goat killer!

Directed by Alex Infascelli (Almost Blue) and written by Niccolò Ammaniti and Antonio Manzini, Il siero della vanità (The Vanity Syndrome) begins with a riot on a TV show called The Sonia Norton Show. As the show’s psychologist leaves the studio, he is knocked out and disappears. He’s not the last Italian TV celebrity to go missing and Sonia Norton (Francecsa Neri) declares that whoever is taking them is in the midst of “an unprecedented attack on the heart of the nation.”

Police detectives Lucia Allasco (Margherita Buy) and Franco Berardi (Valerio Mastandrea) are assigned the case. Allasco is barely recovered from a past investigation in which a colleague was killed and she nearly lost the ability to walk, surviving with a limp.

Those who have been kidnapped — psychologist Michele Benda (Marco Giallini), a fallen Miss Italy named Azzurra Rispoli (Barbora Bobulova), transsexual Rocco Piccolo (Luis Molteni), the singer of the one-hit wonder “Il cuore in soffitt” (“The Heart In the Attic”) Ester Bonanni (Maddalena Maggi), ostrich breeder Domenico Calaciura and a magician named Daniel (Rosario J. Gnolo) who claims to be the son of Houdini — were all on the same episode of The Sonia Norton Show ten years ago.

It turns out that Daniel had taken all of these people hostage and staged an entirely repeated episode of the show so that he can perform Houdini’s Torture of the Chinese Pagoda without a mistake. Somehow, Rocco escapes but is hit by a subway train, which shows Lucia where Daniel is hiding. She barely escapes with her life when he drugs her.

When he does succeed in the performance, he’s caught by Franco, who is followed by Sonia Norton and crew who are doing the show live. They start a whole new episode with the survivors of Daniel’s revenge, all except for Lucia, who limps away from the spotlight.

Sonia’s show is based on one of Italy’s most popular — and trashiest — TV shows, Uomini e Donne (Men and Women). Like The Bachelor, contestants try to find their true love over a three month process. Contestants are called tronistas and the competitions for their love must put on extravagant demonstrations of their character. They are graded and then selected or denied a private date with the tronista. After a series of private dates, each date is played back for the men and women to confront each other in front of a live studio audience, mediated by host Maria De Fillipi.

As much an indictment of Italian pop culture as a giallo, this second effort finds Infascelli moving away from the wild visuals of Almost Blue and working to tell a more understandable story. It’s interesting, but I miss the strangeness of his first effort.

In the streets of Rome, a serial killer is using a set square to murder women, including a teacher named Grazia Scanetti inside her apartment. Policewoman Rita Facino (Mirca Viola, Miss Italia 1987 and the winner of the Miss Hair Look, Miss Computer and Miss Platea awards) is on the case, but there are many red herrings, as you can imagine. When Rita tries to explain that no one knows who the killer is, Visconti (Antonio Petrocelli), the district attorney, doesn’t listen to her.

There’s also a painter in the same building as the killer, Mirta Valenti (Florinda Bolkan, who is the reason I watched this) who is inspired by the murders and starts painting dead women with set squares stabbed into their necks. She also hires a sex worker named Donatella (Elisabetta Rocchetti) to kill her, claiming that she has cancer, but in truth she’s killing her hated housekeeper Laura.

Then there’s singer named Nicole Cardente (Eva Robins from Tenebre) who works with her manager and girlfriend Otilla (Elisabetta Cavallotti) to pretend to get death threats from the killer and then kills Otilia when she starts an affair with a man named Premio (Guido Berti) and makes it looks like the work of the killer, framing Premio, who is shot by the police who as always are blundering in the dark.

So we know who killed victim two and three, but who killed the teacher? And what does Franco Nero playing an unhoused man have to do with any of this?

This movie was directed by Pierfrancesco Campanella, who wrote the story with Gianluca Curti and Enzo Gallo. Salvatore Ferraro , who was on trial after he was accused of aiding in the murder of a student named Marta Russo, was a technical consultant, which got this movie some negative press. But any publicity, you know…

This was an attempt to make a movie that looked to the thirty-year-past world of giallo. In no way is it anywhere close to even the lowest level 70s giallo, but it does have some nice gore effects. It’s not as bad as some reviews will say, but I think you need to be obsessed with the genre to enjoy this.

The sequel to August Underground, this shot on digital video — in Pittsburgh — movie is supposed to look like snuff and does a pretty good job of getting close, one assumes.

Peter Mountain (director and writer Fred Vogel) now has a girlfriend, Crusty (Cristie Whiles) who also has a relationship with her brother Maggot (Michael Todd Schneider).

After nearly attacking his girlfriend — she gets him off by self-mutilating herself instead — they got to a crackhouse and beat the owner with a hammer. This is followed by watching a drug abuser die, assaulting a kidnapped woman and cutting a man’s penis off. This is about ten minutes in, so you know, if you want to turn back now, this would be the time.

There’s also a scene where they caused a ruckus in the old Incredibly Strange Video in Dormont and I wish the whole movie was just an hour or so of Bruce walking the camera through the aisles and showing what movies he just got in versus watching people defile corpses and cut themselves, but I didn’t make this one, you know?

This film was also directed and written by Whiles, Jerami Cruise, Michael Todd Schneider and Killjoy, who is Killjoy DeSade from the bands Necrophagia, Viking Crown, Eibon, Wurdulak, Forlis, The Ravenous and Enoch.

Unearthed has given this movie a packed blu ray including commentary with Jerami Cruise and Ultra Violent Magazine‘s Art Ettinger plus a Toetag commentary; new interviews with Vogel, Cruise and Maggot; a Necrophagia music video; memories of Killyjoy; deleted and extended scenes; a photo gallery; trailer and even breakdowns of some of the most disgusting and terrifying scenes in this.

A warning: This movie isn’t for everyone. It wasn’t for me. I see no redeeming value in non-stop murder presented as near pornography with no conclusion other than the credits. Yet some people like extreme movies and to prove that they can make it through some repugnant material. Who am I to tell you what to watch? That said, the actual blu ray is so well made and Unearthed has gone all out on it. If you’re a fan, here it is.

You can get this from MVD.

Roulette One is a flying luxury casino filled with millionaires and a casino manager who plans on robbing them thanks to his computer programmed to cheat. But then the plane flies through a cloud and everyone on board starts to either become a monster or become eaten by those monsters.

If anyone else made this movie, I’d be calling out how much of it rips off The Thing, Alien and maybe even The Langoliers. Instead, it’s an Alvaro Passeri movie and I’m celebrating it.

Soon, the crew of Carol (Sinne Mutsaers), Janet (Basia Wajs), Don (Eric Bassanesi) and Pat (Giulia Bernardini) are dealing with alien monsters that explode out of people and I’m loving every moment on this CGI-generated plane. And by CGI, I mean everything looks unreal beyond belief. And then Janet has an alien literally crawl between her legs and impregnate her.

I’ve never even considered a movie made with Amiga-level computer animation that has mini-golf on a luxury jet and chess that people bet on. Everything looks soft and brightly colored, like candy that I can’t wait to let my eyes devour. There are also so many lens flares.

Why do they have a flamethrower on this plane? Actually, of all the questions I have, that’s the simplest one. The big one is who are these movies for outside of Passeri? Every one of his films is so idiosyncratic and outright strange and not in the way that says, “Look how wacky I am!” They are absolutely earned strangeness, pure joy captured and ready to reach those ready for it.

Also: Every review that I read where people talk about how bad this movie is or how horrible the effects are, I don’t get mad. I feel bad for these people. I am saddened for them and their lack of imagination and aesthetics.

I also totally appreciate that of all the things that Passeri has ripped off for this movie, the ending of Nightmare City is one of them.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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

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

Its heroine, Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), is a full 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 as 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, the same one 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. Also, Nicole Kidman got a producer credit because she was originally cast as Frannie, but dropped out in the middle of her div force to Tom Cruise, wanting more time with her children.

I really 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 is able to 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 that I was wrong.

You can get the uncut director’s edition of In the Cut from Mill Creek Entertainment on Deep Discount.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on January 30, 2023. As I’ll be exploring the films of director and writer Philip Cook this week, this movie has been reposted with lots of added new material.

Gordon Hauge (Mark Redfield) gets fired, kicked out of his apartment and dumped by his wife Maggie (Gage Sheridan) all in one day, then wrecks his car and wakes up under attack by the Ragmen and Shadowmen of purgatory, the world between heaven and hell. He soon meets others who are trapped here because they ended their lives in a moment of noble sacrifice, all united in combat against the dreaded Despiser, a horrific blast of 2003 CGI that crashed into our planet when his spaceship slammed into Russia in 1908 and caused the Tunguska event.

Despiser feels like a Canadian movie but it’s made in Virginia.

It has the tones of a faith film but is packed with tons of violence.

And it feels like parts of The Wizard of Oz, The Stand and Lord of the Rings yet has so many strange ideas inside it that it feels like nothing else. Or, as the official site says, director and writer Philip Cook “was intrigued by the idea of an alternative world like ours, recognizable but skewed, dark and ominous—a blend of our culture mixed with macabre fantasy. This concept became the purgatory, a place where, after death, one’s soul is purified of sin—by suffering. But in this story, something has gone terribly wrong with it. It’s no longer a clearinghouse for confused souls; it’s become bottlenecked, out of balance and fraught with conflict.”

Keep in mind that this isn’t a movie with a multimillion-dollar budget but instead is a combination of green screen shot on video footage and all the CGI money could buy in 2003. If you liked the strange worlds that show up in Fungicide, good news. This goes even harder, if that’s possible. It feels like if you stare at it long enough, you’ll be able to see a sailboat in its pixels.

Cook was a vet by the time that he made this, as he had already written, directed, edited and/or photographed hundreds of commercials for clients ranging from The Washington Opera to MTV. Before that, he worked on Nightbeast for Don Dohler, Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor and was the director of photography for Godfrey Ho on the Cynthia Rothrock movie Undefeatable. 

When he made this movie in 1998, no one was making movies with a stylized look like this. It’s accepted now — just look at how The Mandalorian has been filmed — but in the five years it took to make, Cook said that “the audience was jaded because 3D was everywhere. Special effects aren’t special anymore.”

I disagree. No movie anywhere looks like Despiser.

It even has some intriguing heroes beyond Gordon, like Nimbus (Doug Brown), a soldier who has been in purgatory since World War One, kamikaze pilot Tomasawa (Frank Smith), Jake (Michael Weitz) and Charlie Roadtrap (Tara Bilkins).

Joe Bob gave this three and a half stars and had these totals: “Forty-nine dead bodies. Five gun battles. Three crash-and-burns. Four motor vehicle chases. One sucker punch. Two body-transformation scenes. One hydrogen explosion. One Viking funeral. One peasant riot. Flaming church. Flaming car. Upside-down crucifixion. Grotesque insect destruction. Doll-stomping. Gratuitous shipwrecks. Kung Fu. Grenade Fu. Bazooka Fu.”

For those that look at the cover image for this and instantly think, “I need to know more,” or loved staring at blacklight posters at Spencer’s or played enough Gamma World, this is for you. It’s definitely for me.

I really can’t recommend this movie enough.

You can watch this on Tubi.