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!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this American giallo on Wednesday, January 4 and Friday, January 7 at 7:00 PM at the Central Cinema in Knoxville, TN along with Dressed to Kill. It also is playing on January 21 at 9:30 PM at Sie Film Center, Denver, CO (tickets here) and January 30 at 7:00 PM PT at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

I’m going to start this off with an unpopular take. This is not a bad movie. When I first met my wife, she used to tell me how much she loved it and I thought she was crazy. Surely, everyone online that went out of their way to destroy it had to be right, right?

Wrong. Go with me on this alternative universe logic — if Lindsey Lohan were a disgraced movie star in 1967 instead of 2007, she would have gone to Italy to make movies for directors like Bava, Argento, Martino and Antonio Margheriti. She would have been in the same company as Anita Ekberg, Florinda Bolkan, Elke Somer and even Edwige Fenech.

The film has all the hallmarks of giallo: a serial killer is abducting, torturing and killing young women in the suburb of New Salem. An evening of fun for Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) turns into weeks of torture as she wakes up bound and gagged on an operating table, her hands deep in dry ice.

The FBI Task Force has already given up hope of finding the killer, but a driver discovers Aubrey on a deserted road in the middle of the night. To the shock of her parents, she declares that she’s really a stripper named Dakota Moss and has no idea who Aubrey Fleming is. And then she realizes that she’s missing her hand and half of her leg.

At this point, you’re either going to give up on this movie or dive in. I advise diving right in.

While the police, the doctors and her parents believe that this is all PTSD, Aubrey/Dakota insists that she is not who anyone thinks she is. Things get weirder when FBI agents discover a story on Aubrey’s laptop about a girl with an alter ego named Aubrey. And DNA confirms that Dakota really is Aubrey. This inversion of identity is key to the main tenets of classic giallo.

Dakota has a theory of her own: She’s Aubrey’s twin sister and her injuries are Corsican Brothers-like (or Tomax and Xamot, if you prefer) sympathetic wounds as she experiences the plight of her symbiotic sibling.

Sure, her mother has a pregnancy ultrasound that shows only one fetus. But Dakota confronts her father (or Aubrey’s, stay with me) as she believes that her mother lost that child soon after its birth and that she and Aubrey were the twin children of a crack addict named Virginia Sue Moss. Aubrey was taken to live in comfort city mouse style while she stayed with Moss, trailer park mouse style. The complication? Virginia Sue Moss was yet another character from Aubrey’s short story.

Richard Roeper claims that this is the worst movie of the 2000s, calling the film “a ridiculous thriller (minus the thrills)” and saying that it’s filled with a” nonsensical plot that grows sillier by the second, tawdry special effects, heavy-handed symbolism that’s big on electric-blue hues and mechanical performances are all culprits as far as the title’s concerned.” Has Roeper even seen a giallo? Because reading that sentence makes me want to watch this movie all over again!

Back to the movie: Dakota starts to see visions of the killer slicing up his captive which draws her to the cemetery. As she investigates the grave of another victim, Aubrey’s friend Jennifer, she finds a blue ribbon from a piano competition. Aubrey was a noted pianist and there’s a note attached from her (and Jennifer’s) piano teacher, Douglas Norquist. As her father (or Aubrey’s, look, it’s not a giallo if you don’t get confused) looks on, she declares, “I know who killed me.”

That’s because the ribbon says, “Blue Ribbons Are For Winners, Never Settle For The Red, Rest In Peace, Douglas.” It’s a metaphor for the lives of the twins: Aubrey is the blue chipper with a boyfriend that loves her, good grades, plenty of friends and a bright future. Dakota works in the red light district and faces a life of poverty.

Without any police backup — again, this happens all the time in giallo — they confront Norquist. Daniel is killed before Aubrey leaves the safety of the car and enters the house. She fights Norquist, cutting off his hand, before she’s tied up. He asks her why she returned after he buried her alive before she frees herself and kills him. She heads into the woods where she digs up Aubrey, verifying that she was not insane and had been right all along. Then, she lies on the ground with her twin sister.

Some of the few critics who liked this movie compared it to Brian DePalma or David Lynch films. Sure. Or you could go right to the source — Italy.

If you replaced the score of the film (that said, I love that The Sword and The Melvins are heard in this film) with some insane synth or orchestral music (someone get Claudio Simonetti, Piero Umiliani or Morricone on the line), if you made the homes space age lounges filled with improbable furniture and if you had more than one scene of Lohan stripping (any of the sex in this movie is honestly the unsexiest sex ever, they should have really studied Sergio Martino movies), this movie would fit perfectly into my DVD collection between Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Inferno. Who am I kidding? It’s on my shelf already!

This is not the first time Lohan played twins on film, thanks to starring in the remakes of Freaky Friday and The Parent Trap. Again, this is perfect giallo casting — not to mention pure exploitation — showing her gone to seed as two twins who couldn’t be more different.

However, this was not an easy movie to film for director Chris Sivertson, as Lohan had an appendix operation during shooting. Plus, there were times when she would not show up at all — necessitating a body double be used to film the end of the movie. Even worse, she was followed by paparazzi throughout the shoot and some of them are still in the background of a few shots!

There are giallo techniques used throughout the film, such as a neon sign outside the strip club that foreshadows Dakota’s injuries and the fact that Bava-esque blue and red lighting determines which character is on screen between Aubrey and Dakota.

While so many decry this film for not making any sense, if you’ve made it through any number of classics (sure, the director claims Hitchcock as a primary influence, but you can say that he’s the well from which all giallo flows) like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red or A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, you’re going to be just fine. The world was just ready to devour Lindsey Lohan and this film would be its sacrificial lamb. Oh if only there were an Italian film industry for her to turn to and appear alongside Ivan Rassimov!

After The Naked Mile, Erik Stifler (John White) and his cousin Dwight (Steve Talley) are back as Erik finally makes it to college and, well, gets to be in cosplay Animal House. Erik has brought along his friend Mike “Cooze” Coozeman (Jake Siegel) and has already broken up with his girlfriend Tracy, so any of the reason for the last movie having tension are over. Now, it’s time to join Beta House and sleep with co-eds.

Unlike the other Stiflers, Erik is a nice guy and falls for Ashley Thomas (Meghan Heffern), a nice girl confirming that Erik is again not like everyone else. Cooze gets into her roommate Denise (Sarah Power) who gives handjobs instead of sex, so everyone thinks she’s transgender because 2007 was not all that very long ago. There’s also Bobby (Nick Nicotera), the gross-out friend who is supposed to have an equally non-attractive girlfriend, except that beauty standards have also changed since this was made and Margie (Christine Barger) is super cute and way more sex positive than any other woman in this movie.

Then the movie becomes Revenge of the Nerds and goes into a series of drunken games officiated by Noah Levenstein (Eugene Levy), reminding us that this is an American Pie movie.

This was directed by Andrew Waller and written by Erik Lindsay, who was also behind the script from The Naked Mile. Do you need to watch it? Do you have a Christopher McDonald Letterboxd list? Or are you just trying to watch bad sequels like me?

While filming a horror movie about a mummy in a forest, some University of Pittsburgh — yet this was shot in Toronto — students and their professor learn from the news — with the soundtrack taken directly from Night of the Living Dead — that recently dead are awaking and walking.

The fifth film in Romero’s series of Living Dead films — it’s actually a prequel to Land of the Dead — Diary changed the way he shot films. It used computer-generated imagery which allowed for the film to be shot quickly with just a few handheld cameras instead of the multiple angles, long filming sessions and extensive editing he was known for. Personally, I understand the experiment, but I don’t want to see a master like Romero making a found footage movie.

Romero told Cinemablend, “I had this idea that I could use film students out shooting a school project and zombies begin to walk and they document it. I wanted to do this subjective camera thing before I knew anybody else was working on it. I didn’t know about Cloverfield or anything else. I thought we were going to be the first guys out there with one of these.” He still used a cinematographer to try and keep the shots looking less like the shakycam that most found footage makes me nauseated with.

I’d like to report that this film is good but I struggled through every scene. What always worked for me — at least in the first three Living Dead films — is that you find characters to feel for and get to root for. None of these students seem as if they can come close to that. If anything, the subtext has become full text and even more ham-fisted. Seriously, if you think that defibrillator to the zombie’s head is awesome, that’s what the messages in this movie are doing to your brain. Where Dawn hinted, this screams in your face, “Do you get it?”

The effects are pretty good but this whole thing just made me sad. I realize that people need to keep working, money needs to keep being made, but I started to feel like I do when I watch a later Argento movie. I want it to be great, I keep rooting for it and then I just feel this tremendous wave of sadness. I want more from the directors I love and I realize in no way is that fair. They’ve given me enough.

This is without a doubt the dumbest — and therefore most awesome — Thanksgiving slasher I’ve seen. It starts with a topless pilgrim woman being murdered by a turkey. A turkey named Turkie who was reborn through necromacy by  Feathercloud, a Native American shaman dishonored by pilgrim Chuck Langston. Now, every five-hundred and five years, Turkie rises to kill every white man he sees.

If you see a miniature totem pole, don’t allow your dog to piss on it. That just releases undead talking and murder-loving turkeys from their dark sleep. I usually dislike movies that set out to be funny, but this is a movie that has a turkey wear Groucho glasses to sneak its way past someone who doesn’t even noticed that they are speaking with a zombie ghost turkey.

Shot during the summer break between director Jordan Downey and writer Kevin Stewart’s junior and senior year of college — Brad Schulz also wrote the script — the team went on to make The Head Hunter as well as an even wilder sequel.

This was to be called Death Turkey in countries that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I love that title more than I can even write here.

A turkey uses a handgun. If you need more from film, you should really just be a grumpy old man.

If you’re ready to get the holiday started right, watch this on Tubi.