In the third film in the trilogy, Peter Mountain (Fred Vogel, who directed, wrote and shot this) and his girlfriend Crusty (Cristie Whiles) keep on killing on video, but now the footage is more high definition and you can see more of it.

Made in Pittsburgh, Penance has fireworks in it, so you know that it’s definitely made by yinzers. It also has numerous gut wrenching murders that are not made to look pretty but to look as real as possible. You may not be into that. You also may and well, I guess this is the extreme movie that you’re looking for.

It has everything from racing ATVs and seeing bands to killing an entire family, feeding a deer to a lion, beating people with hammers and cutting babies out of pregnant women. It also has its two leads basically having nervous breakdowns as they commit these horrific acts.

There’s an audience for this. It’s not me.

The Unearthed blu ray of this film has new audio commentary with Jerami Cruise, Shelby Vogel, Fred Vogel, and Ultra Violent Magazine‘s Art Ettinger, several new interview with Fred Vogels and others, older audio commentary by Toetag and Vogel, Disemboweled: Behind the Bile Documentary, extended and deleted scenes, music videos, trailers and more. You can get it 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.

When the rest of the world makes zombie movies that are either boring or sub-Troma winks at the camera filled with humor that breaks the tension, Bruno Mattei remains single-mindedly devoted to making the kind of undead movies that made me love the genre.

In short, in the sad world we find ourselves in where zombies have become boring, Bruno Mattei alone reminds us that these kinds of movies can remain incredibly fun.

After a team of adventurers loses their gold, they go through a fog bank and end up on an island of the living dead. There, nearly everyone dies as they’re pursued by shambling, blood puking monsters that never stop. Oh yeah, there’s also another higher caste of zombies that act like a cross between the Blind Dead and vampires, hypnotizing unwilling victims into becoming their thralls, even if they have to charm them with flutes!

I’ve come away from Mattei’s late period — he made this movie a year before his death — digital video films with great fondness, particularly for Yvette Yzon, who has taken over for Laura Gemser in his movies, starring in this, Zombies: The Beginning, The Jail: Women’s Hell, A Shudder on the Skin and two Segreti di Donna films for Mattei.

Here, she’s Sharon, not only the final girl but the Lara Croft of this story. The rest of her crew is pretty worthless, except for Snoopy, who gets his name by always wearing a Snoopy t-shirt. This is an astonishing choice for a zombie film and one that I applaud. He’s played by Jim Gaines, who has been in plenty of Mattei films like Robowar, Zombie 4, Strike Commando and even shows up in The One-Armed Executioner.

Want an even better name? The leader of the ship is Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats and Trhauma, which he wrote)!

Screenwriter Antonio Tentori has been there for the dark night of the soul that aging Italian horror filmmakers must endure, being the scribe for everything from Argento’s Dracula 3D to Fulci’s Cat in the Brain and D’Amato’s Frankenstein 2000.

Only Sharon survives, but it appears that she becomes a zombie. No worry — she comes back perfectly healthy in the sequel, Zombies: The Beginning. Yes, only Mattei would name the second movie — or third, if this is in the same universe as Hell of the Living Dead — with a title like Zombies: The Beginning.

What are we to think of a movie that has not only the Necronomicon but also the De Vermis Mysteriis and the Cask of Amontillado? A film willing to rip off The Fog, Night of the Living Dead, Ghost Ship, Fulci’s eyeball scene in Zombi, the Blind Dead movies and even Mattei’s own Hell of the Living Dead? A movie that outright steals footage from The 13th Warrior, Interview with the Vampire, Deep Rising and House of the Dead?

We are to celebrate it. Thank you, Bruno Mattei, for always making it cheap, gross and upsetting, but never ever boring. The spirit and flame of 1980s Italian horror was kept alive by you longer than anyone.

Brian De Palma does not shy away from showing the dark side of war. In the same way that he looked at Vietnam with Casualties of War, Redacted is about the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq where U.S. Army soldiers raped an Iraqi girl and murdered her along with her family.

PFC Angel “Sally” Salazar (Izzy Diaz) is an aspiring filmmaker who has joined the Army to save money for film school. He uses his camera to shoot the real moments that he sees as a soldier in the hopes of using his film, Tell Me No Lies, for his application. Two of his fellow platoon members, PFC Reno Flake (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and SPC B.B. Rush (Patrick Carroll), lose all control after the death of MSG James Sweet (Ty Jones), a military officer who has kept them in check on this tour.

While Salazr is filming, a French documentary crew is also embedded with the soldiers and making a movie called Barrage. During a traditional sweep, Flake misinterprets a man driving his pregnant sister to the hospital as an attack and strafes their car, killing her. He tells Salazar’s camera that it felt the same as gutting a fish.

After Sweey’s death, Flake and Rush decide that they want revenge. Specialist Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) follows them in the hopes of stopping them while Salazar films everything. They find an Iraqi girl named Farrah (Zahra Zubaidi) who they rape and murder, then kill her family before setting his body on fire. McCoy, forced out under threat of death, decides to report the incident with the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). At the same time, Salazar starts to lose his mind. He’s so distracted one day and kidnapped by insurgents who videotape his death by beheading in revenge for Farrah’s rape and murder.

After returning home, McCoy is at a bar with his wife when he is asked to tell them a war story. This movie is what he tells them.

This movie was as controversial as you’d imagine, with critics like Michael Medved saying, “It could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” It also may have led to Arid Uka killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt Airport after watching a clip of this movie and thinking it was true.

Redline was the working title of The Fast and the Furious, a movie that definitely — alright, totally — inspired this movie.

The controversy around the film may be a bigger story than the movie, as it was produced by Daniel Sadek, who also wrote this movie.

Sadek dropped out of school in Lebanon in the third grade and worked in gas stations and car dealerships when he made it to the U.S. He noticed all the most expensive cars at his job at Fletcher Jones Mercedes Bentz were being bought by people in the real estate market, so he went into the field. By 2007, his Quick Loan Funding had approved US$4 billion in subprime mortgages, and he was making $5 million a month.

What do you do with that kind of money?

You gamble. You buy a lot of homes. You buy a lot of cars. You make vanity productions where your cars get destroyed on film.

Sadek funded this movie with subprime loans issued by his company, which closed its doors after the subprime mortgage crisis. Then, in late 2008, his lending and escrow license was revoked by the California Department of Corporations.

Vanity Fair listed Sadek at number 86 in their 100 to Blame for the economic crisis. They called him “Predator Zero in the subprime-mortgage game.” He declared bankruptcy and owed millions to all sorts of folks.

Of course, banks get bought out but those caught in the savings and loan crisis, the people like you and me, well…

We don’t get cars like this.

On the streets of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, daredevil drivers race the world’s most exotic cars with gangster Michael D’Orazio (Angus Macfadyen), hip hop producer Infamous (Eddie Griffith), Hollywood producer Jerry Brecken (Tim Matheson) and Chinese businessman Marcus Cheng (Michael Hagiwara) making bets in the millions.

The racers include gorgeous auto mechanic, driver and rock star Natasha Martin (Nadia Bjorlin, who engaged to Sadek at the time this was made) in a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and Carlo (Nathan Phillips), who is trying to keep his brother Jason (Jesse Johnson) away from their Uncle Michael (yes, the mob guy). Everyone has all sorts of side bets and Uncle Michael also wants Natasha for himself. But first, Jason tries to race and his Lamborghini Diablo ends up in flames.

The best part of this movie is the stunts and the driving. It was directed by stuntman and fight choreographer Andy Cheng (a former member of Jackie Chan’s stunt team) and has cinematography by Bill Butler (Jaws, Lipstick, Grease), so it looks awesome while the cars are on the road.

One more bit of Sadek: he loaned an Enzo, just like the one in Redline, to Eddie Griffin for a charity race. Griffin lost control of the Enzo and crashed into a concrete barrier, totaling the car but not being injured. That was another $300,000 dollars lost. Sadek had to sell all of his cars not long after this movie, including all of the ones used on screen.

That Koenigsegg CCX that shows up at the end? It has a 4.7 liter twin-supercharged V8, 806 horsepower and can hit more than 245 mph.

The MVD blu ray release of Redline also has a making of feature, a video of the cast at the L.A. Auto Show — where the Porsche Carrera GT that Sadek gave to be crashed in the movie was shown — and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

Ovidie, who stars in this film, was a “very active militant feminist” when she started her adult career. At first, she thought that porn was filled with injustice for women but was shocked by how the women were powerful sexual beings. Seeing how that worked with her feminist ideals, she started acting and said, “I am interested in these sort of experiences not just because I am perverse, which as you have seen I can be when I want to be. No, it’s because not everyone can achieve them.” After a year as a performer, she started directing movies by women for women, just like the adult store that she owns, as well as crossing over to mainstream in movies like All About Anna, in which she performed explicit and unsimulated oral sex on mainstream actress/singer Gry Bay.

That’s who Jean Rollin picked to play Isabelle, the heroine of his next to last film and this makes sense, so much sense, as so much of his work has been about the juxtaposition and duality of the virginal and the sexual. He’s a man who strove to make fairy tales about vampires, castles and beaches and yet had to pay for them by changing his name and directing dirty movies. Yet no matter what he makes, there they exist, the innocent and the profane.

Isabelle has inherited a home from her uncle, who was a writer and filmmaker. Within that home, she discovers the lost memories of a dead man, a place forever haunted by not only his characters and fantasies but the movies and moments of Rollin.

So while this has a title that means The Night of the Clocks and that sounds vaguely Italian, you should also know that this is Rollin’s very own Cat In the Brain as he brings back the people and times and memories of a man who at the age of seventy is looking back at the struggles of attempting to create myth that can last.

So Ovidie steps into the shoes of Brigitte Lahaie, another actress that Rollin took from adult and found his perfect woman and then brings back so many images and feelings and yet also has so many new things, like the wax sculptures that show how the body decays, surely a fact that was weighing on him. Indeed, Rollin had but three years left on Earth when he made this movie. And that wax museum was to be all that he was to film, but he was so inspired when he saw it that this film came from it, financed all with his own money.

Between the moment when the clock coffin catches on fire and realizing that this was shot in the same cemetery as The Iron Rose, not to mention how much fun everyone seems to be having, I have to confess tearing up a few times. It’s disconcerting to watch someone’s entire film output within just a few days and then have this resolution, although Rollin would make one more movie. I have no idea what the word for this emotion is. It’s sadness mixed with happiness that it happened. Maybe it’s just life.

Italian directors in America is one of my favorite subgenres, so imagine my joy at discovered that Pupi Averti made this haunted house giallo in Davenport, IA and the Warner Castle in Orion, IL.

Francesca Sainati (Laura Morante) moved to Iowa 15 years ago to open her own restaurant, but after the suicide death of her husband, she’s struggled at even being able to live a normal life, spending some time in an asylum. Now, as she attempts to open a second business, she learns of a fifty-year-old murder conspiracy.

Beyond its Italian cast — Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Sydne Rome (Some Girls Do, The Pumaman) made the trip to America — this also stars Treat Williams, Burt Young and Rita Tushingham, who played the grandmother in modern giallo Last Night In Soho and was also in Doctor Zhivago). A warning, however. Nearly every line in this movie is whispered, as if this were proto-ASMR. And there are also two orphans that have somehow — and this is a major spoiler, mind you — who stayed alive by drinking rainwater and eating rats within the walls of the decaying mansion where Francesca thinks people are going to come and eat. I mean, half of restaurants go out of business in the first year and she’s going to open hers in a place called Snake Castle?

While not a perfect film, Averti made The House With the Laughing Windows, so I will watch anything that he directs. And hey — it has a score by Riz Ortolani!