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.

I’m always kind of interested in when a cartoon revises its characters to become characters from A Christmas Carol. Daffy Duck, yes, I buy him as Scrooge, now running a big store called Lucky Duck and ruining the lives of the other Looney Tunes. Also, because there aren’t all that many Looney Tunes to go around, this has to go deep cut and include characters like Playboy Penguin, Priscilla Pig, Egghead Jr., Henery Hawk and Barnyard Dawg Jr. along with the characters that everyone knows.

Porky is Bob Cratchit, Sylvester the Cat is Jacob Marley, Granny and Tweety are the Ghost of Christmas Past, Yosemite Sam as the Present and Tasmanian Devil is the Future. As for other characters, most of them — Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn, The Three Bears, Sam Sheepdog, Claude Cat, Charlie Dog, Miss Prissy, Gossamer, Barnyard Dawg, Mac, Tosh, Hippety Hopper, Beaky Buzzard, Pete Puma, Hubie and Bertie  — all work in the store.

Bugs Bunny just starts the whole thing off and keeps coming back to upset the duck. This doesn’t get into the sadness of the Charles Dickens story to the level that A Flintstones Christmas Carol gets into. I mean, that leans into death like no cartoon I’ve seen outside of Japanese ones.

But you know, if you want to put on a modern Looney Tunes and see how they’d treat a classic, here it is. I know that this is where as old man I need to mention that I grew up on the originals and how much better they would be than this, but man, all these battles against the fact that things are always worse and that this was made 17 years ago and there have been worse things since then has diminished my fighting edge.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chiisaki Yūsha-tachi Gamera (Little Hero: Gamera) is the 12th Gamera movie and the second reboot. It’s also the first movie in the series made by Kadokawa Daiei Studio after the company purchased Daiei Film. There was no sequel and no more Gamera films until 2023’s Gamera Rebirth animated series.

In 1973, Kousuke (Kanji Tsuda) watched as the town of Shima, Mie was destroyed by several Gyaos until Gamera saved the day, helping everyone to escape before destroying himself to stop the threat.  Thirty three years later, he’s a widower with a son named Toru (Ryo Tomioka). Life is hard and his son worries constantly about losing everyone in his life after the death of his mother.

One day, he and his friends Katsuya and Ishimaru discover an egg near where Gamera was last seen. It soon grows into a small turtle that can spin and fly just like the larger kaiju. He’s just in time, as there’s another kaiju called Zedus who is eating people and destroying cities. He easily defeats Toto who is saved by the government and healed. However, the red stone that is needed to give him his full power has been given to Toru’s friend Mai (Kaho) for luck as she goes into surgery.

Directed by Ryuta Tasaki, who has directed several Kamen Rider movies, and written by Yukari Tatsui, this had some complain that it was too kid-friendly. Maybe they hadn’t watched any Gamera movies before, those that believed all the older movies were for grown-ups.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

SPOILER WARNING: You can probably consider this review a bit unobjective seeing as how I love this movie so much and contributed to the commentary and liner notes for the blu ray release.

You should totally buy it from MVD because it comes with a limited edition slipcase New Hampshire Forest Scent air freshener, commentary with director Rob Roy, another commentary with Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me, an interview with Rob Roy, the Rifftrax version of the movie, a music video, bloopers, a trailer, liner notes, a mini-poster, a sticker set and a reversible blu ray sleeve.

Director and writer Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto, which inspired him to create his own wolf film. The film you’re about to reach about. The film during which he attempted to contact Balto star Kevin Bacon for a cameo before being somewhat ironically chased off the actor’s property by dogs.

He told the Nashua Telegraph, “Let me say first of all that I am an animal lover. No werewolves were hurt during the making of Lycan Colony. I’ve always loved werewolf movies, but I’m tired of seeing the same storyline over and over again. The werewolf is always a sick tormented beast. He’s always the bad guy. In Lycan Colony, we filled a whole town with them. Some are good, some are bad. None of them are these simple monsters that show up for five minutes at the end of the movie. They’re the life and blood of a modern town, and much closer to us than we’re used to seeing in these movies.”

Roy is self-taught and learned every aspect of filmmaking – from make-up effects to building his own camera dollies, animatronic heads and blood sprayers as well as building his own blue-screen shooting area in his garage – while making this movie. 

Dr. Daniel Solomon (Bill Sykes), a disgraced alcoholic surgeon, and his family move to a small town in the wake of one of his surgeries under the influence costing a patient their life. He has an AA sponsor so bad that he takes him to a bar afterward, a bar where he meets a brother and sister who are ex-military and looking for their adventurer father. Seconds after they explain the inscription on their father’s watch, the bartender ends up dropping it on their table, which is like Chekov’s gun going off before you even see it. This leads to a werewolf attack within the bar, the military brother getting killed and Daniel falling through what can only be a warp zone to escape.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s son Stewart (Ryan O Roy) has fallen for Sarah (Libby Collins), who comes ot his room late at night and brings him to a graveyard where she bites his chest and makes him one of the cursed under the full moon.

Who can save the day? Maybe it’s Athena, the witch played by Kristi Lynn, who loaned all of her exotic animals to this movie which still doesn’t explain why a spider monkey randomly shows up at the end. She licks everything with sight and then explains the history of werewolves in animation that I am not even remotely sure can be referred to as animation. Speaking of animation, the military guy has a neck tattoo that was added in post and it flickers. It’s the most disconcerting take-you-out-of-the-movie thing I’ve ever seen and yes, it is awesome.

Made in Hudson, Bedford, Goffstown, Merrimack and Manchester, New Hampshire — which is why this had the tagline “Welcome to New Hampshire…Live free or die!” — you’ll perhaps struggle with some of the accents. These towns are the homes of stars like Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman, Jane Balder from V, Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place and Adam Sandler. Perhaps most relevant to this film are the facts that GG Allin was born there as well as The Howling star Christopher Stone.

Keeping it local, the movie premiere at Chunky’s Cinema Pub in Pelham on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005 with a concert/film screening/Halloween costume contest extravaganza. At Chunky’s you can order a Caesar Romero Salad, Wizard of Ozzarella Sticks, Reservoir Dogs (yes hot dogs), the Parmageddon Chicken Sandwich, a Kevin Bacon Burger, a Carrie Cosmo, the Catalina Wine Mixer Sangria, Jurassic Pork Tacos, Rum Forrest Rum or a Jabba the Hot Fudge Sundae.

If you ask Rob Roy, he says that this movie is about “The sensual underbelly of animalistic human beings and what happens when we surrender to that.” He’s expanded the universe of the film in Rage of the Theriomorphs, a book in which Dr. Dan, Dave, Russ, Stew, and Sarah are back and getting accustomed to their new lives and new rules. A new mysterious death has caused an uproar and a new threat to the entire town has arrived. This needs to be a movie, right?

Lycan Colony is the kind of movie that shuts off my brain and lets someone else drive. I never really recovered.