This film took 13 years for Christiane Cegavske to make and it was worth every second.

The White Mice have commissioned a doll from the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak, but once she is created, the artists have fallen in love with her. They place an egg inside her body and have put her into a place of worship. The mice return and steal her away, sending the creatures on a journey to get her back.

Excited at having the doll, the mice become besotted on blood tea. The egg hatches and a bird with the face of the doll emerges, flying away but soon becoming trapped in a web and dying. The artist dwellers take her back and rebuild the dead body, but it’s stolen again by the mice. The battle between them causes it to be torn to pieces, which leads to the creatures giving the mice the doll parts and sending the body of the bird downstream.

Shot on 16mm in stop motion style that had to take forever — or 13 years, but it had to feel like forever to create — the description above will not prepare you for what you are about to experience. With no dialogue, you are free to imagine who these characters are and what they represent. I can’t even explain the vibe of this, as it looks like something for children while feeling occult and forbidden. A must see.

Blood Tea and Red String is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction director Christiane Cegavske, a Q & A with Cegavske, production stills, concept illustrations, a trailer and a trailer for Seed In the Sand, Cegavske’s work-in-progress.

You can order this set from Severin.

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.

After Hurricane Xiora, the empowered Florida militia shoots a looter who has run into the swamps after he kills two of their men. Sergeant Barnes (Todd Terry) shoots him and learns that he was stealing diapers and baby food, just in time for the man’s voodoo grandmother (Yvone Williamson) to snap his neck.

Lieutenant Hutchinson (J. Todd Smith) and his unit are sent to find Barnes. He’s conflicted, as he joined to honor the memory of his father, who died in Desert Storm. He’s also not so sure that as a black man he should be ordering white men to shoot black people no matter what they’re doing.

Joined by weather reporter Lisa Hicks (Karin Justman) — yes, that happens in this movie — the unit finds two survivors who just so happens to be voodoo slaves to the grandmother.

Directed and written by Bob Cook (Rock-A-Die Baby, Animals), this has people wandering a swamp for most of the movie and delivers its one zombie quite late in the film. My favorite character was Corporal Dani Stevens (Debra Cassano), who ends up tongue kissing one of the privates by force in the bar and laughing at him. She got kicked out of the Marines for attacking her commander and is only in the militia to make her dad happy. Cassano is really good in the part and stands out.

This has an interesting anti-military, pro-looting message that you may not expect and some nice scenery. If you aren’t into movies where people wander aimlessly — I am kind of comforted by it — you will probably not enjoy yourself.

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.

Imani (Shatara Curry) has a boyfriend she’s putting through college while she works a job and is in school herself. After giving everything to her man, she feels like he doesn’t care, so after advice from her girlfriends — who are all getting abortions at the same time from the same doctor — she gets rid of him and goes to the club, where she meets Flip (Esteban Lastra) who takes her away for the weekend.

The problem is one of his friends watches her ex grab her behind and they assume she’s a gold digger. She’s drugged and assaulted several times, including after they leave by a hotel worker who she follows and murders. She finds herself hunting down all of the men who raped her before realizing that she may never run out of victims.

This is a movie that somehow combines live performances of spoken word with an abortion and a castration. It’s intense and at the same time quite cheap in the best possible sense of the word, feeling real and messy and I love that. Directed by Roderick Giles and written by Jeff Carroll (Holla If I Kill You), it’s in no way perfect but who needs that? It’s instead a film that looks at the war between the sexes and responds with bullets to the head and knives to dicks.

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.

Remember when there were a whole bunch of Brendan Fraser mummy movies? What if Bruno Mattei made his own version of those movies — using the name David Hunt — and filled it with all of the wonderful things that his movies are known for? Well, he did. He sure did.

Over the last few years of his career, Mattei began working with Giovanni “Gianni” Paolucci, who wrote and produced his films Dangerous Attraction, Snuff Killer, Mondo Cannibal, In the Land of the Cannibals, The Jail: The Women’s Hell, Island of the Living Dead, Zombies: The Beginning, Capriccio Veneziano, Privé, Belle da Morire and the sequel to that film. Before working with Mattei, he also wrote and produced Antonio Margheriti’s The Ark of the Sun God and was the producer of Argento’s Dracula 3D (as well as the upcoming Antropophagus II, which will be directed by Dario Germani).

The amazing thing is that now that Bruno has moved on to digital video, he’s able to completely not just rip off movies — this is The Mummy right down to the bad guy who looks kinda sorta like Arnold Vosloo — he’s now able to even more easily copy and paste footage from other films directly into his own. Now, when a major Hollywood film takes a plot point, I get apoplectic. Yet when Matti outright takes entire scenes from other movies, I get overjoyed. Such are the weird ways of how I enjoy film.

That means that while Bruno takes the Titty Twister scenes that were a major part of From Dusk Till Dawn and films his own version, he is just as comfortable with directly taking footage from Army of Darkness and The Mummy and inserting them into The Tomb.

Somehow, the guide that a group of students is using to get through the Aztec pyramids is the reincarnation of an evil priestess and one of those students is the reincarnation of the girl who her lover never got to sacrifice because movie logic demands these things occur. Again, in any other movie, I’d roll my eyes, but I kind of demand these kinds of things from the Italian masters of beyond basement value movies.

Then, to show us all that Mattei does not care at all about the world of Hollywood, he outright takes footage from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I doubt Spielberg had any idea who Bruno Mattei was, but just the sheer “Che palle!” of Mattei brings a tear to my eye. Then, to top that, he also ripped off footage from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!

This isn’t the best movie Bruno ever made — I cannot and will not answer that impossible inquiry — but damn if it isn’t a million times better than any mummy movie Hollywood has made said the black and white Universal days.

Irena (Kseniya Rappoport) is a Ukrainian sex worker who is looking for a job in fancy Italian apartment building and starts by cleaning the stairs, even though she already has money. Her plan is to get closer to the Adacher family who lives there, starting by becoming friends with the nanny, Gina (Piera Degli Esposti). And then, when that au pair is crippled by a fall — that Irena may have caused — she’s hired for the same role and takes care of Thea (Clara Dossena).

There’s a reason behind her madness. She has given birth to nine children whose theft was the final dignity that she could not bear in her horrific life. Stabbing her pimp, she has come to Italy as she believes that Thea is her child. And if she has to stage a crash that kills the girl’s mother Valeria (Claudia Gerini), that’s just a means to the end. Bad luck follows Irena as the pimp remains alive and wants the money she took from him. Even though she takes care of him and it seems that she will move into the new motherless house with Thea and her father Donato (Pierfrancesco Favino), the police arrest her.

In jail, she refuses to eat. Thea visits her and feeds her, which gives her an urge to survive. Many years later, we see her finally leave prison behind and a fully grown woman is waiting for her. It is Thea.

The Unknown Woman, unlike many giallo, was a huge success. It won David di Donatello awards for Best Actress – Leading Role for Kseniya Rappoport, Best Cinematography for Fabio Zamarion), Best Director for Giuseppe Tornatore, Best Film and Best Music for Ennio Morricone.

Tornatore is best known for Cinema Paradiso and Massimo De Rita may have written an award-winning movie here, but under the name Max von Ryt he wrote Blastfighter and as Max De Rita he penned Blood Link. Actually, his career stretches back into the 1960s with his first credited script being War of the Zombies.

This was Italy’s official submission to the 80th Oscars Best Foreign Language Film category. It lost to The Counterfeiters.

Regardless of high class this is, it’s heart beats yellow blood.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Alex Infascelli has made some intriguing films. The first of his I saw was his documentary S Is for Stanley, which is about Stanley Kubrick and his personal chauffeur and assistant Emilio D’Alessandro. He also made a few other giallo movies, including Almost Blue and The Vanity Syrum.

Written by Infascelli with Vincent Villani, Olivia (Chiara Conti) and her friends Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), Nicole (Mandala Tayde), Christina (Olga Shuvalova) and Summer (Claire Falconer) have travelled to a farmhouse where they will undergo a purification ritual and only drink water. No phones, no food, just them and water. Of the friends, Olivia is the one who is most often made fun of, as she’s too sweet. But what a secret she has. Inside her body is her unborn twin Helena, who has left behind teeth in her shoulder. While in the middle of the madness that the water brings on, she tears out those vestigial teeth with her hands. And then it gets worse.

Featuring effects by Sergio Stivaletti (The Wax Mask), this feels like a new take on the f giallo, a movie where what should be a peaceful time of meditation is transformed into horror inside a glass-walled villa. I have no idea exactly how it got to where it got, as it could have been polluted water, the hidden twin, witchery or just plain mental illness. A lot of it feels like an art film with giallo leanings — hey, that sounds good — and some reviewers have outright hated the acting and the fact that nothing occurs for long stretches of time. But when it gets going, it really hit with me. Hopefully you will get the same thing out of it.

You can watch this on YouTube.