At the unsuccessful gentlemen’s club Paradise Ikagawa Theatre, there’s Ginko, as well a goth girl named Maria who likes slicing herself and reading occult books, as well as Lena (Sola Aoi, one of the most famous AV idols of the 2000), who can tell you fortune and Darna, who just wants to see her family.

The girls get invited to perform at a neighboring spa whose owner recently committed suicide, which makes this immediately sound like a bad idea, as well as the fact that they’re shamed into using the back door. Lena gets drunk and sleeps with the wrong man, which upsets Ginko, and their fight ends up revealing a Well of Spirits where Darna finds money and Maria finds a very Sam Raimi-like Book of the Dead, but none of the spells work. Except that suddenly, all of the sushi starts coming back to life.

Soon, zombies have taken over the streets of Ikagawa and Maria has become their queen through a combination of candy and flashing them her breasts. I mean, say what you will about insane Japanese movies, but this is how every goth girl I’ve ever met got me to do things I wouldn’t do for millions of dollars.

This was based on the manga Kyonyû doragon and is just as ridiculous as it sounds.

And yes, I totally watched a movie called Big Tits Dragon: Hot Spring Zombie Vs. Stripper 5.

Fifteen years ago, Sandra lost her twin sister Giulia in the woods — they have twin telepathy — but after Sandra steps into a bear trap, Giulia is killed by a serial killer named The Surgeon. Years later, he kills himself and takes away any chance that Sandra would ever be reunited with her sibling when he killed himself and took his secrets with him.

Now, she’s a reporter and her partner Marco joins her as they shoot a behind the scenes feature of Klaus Kinki’s latest adult film, which just so happens to be shot at the mansion that once belonged to The Surgeon.

Sandra feels that this will be a way to get over her sister’s death, Marco discovers that he may have a future in porn and oh yeah, the murders start all over again. And perhaps Sandra keeps seeing her sister’s ghost. Then Sandra finds Giulia’s body. So yes, The Surgeon may be back, but now his victims come back from the dead.

Is the movie just an adult film? Or has Kinki decided to start making snuff? Is Giulia’s ghost on her sister’s side? How did The Surgeon survive? Or is it a copycat? Man, a lot of questions!

A post-Filmirage Italian movie that feels like it belongs in the 80s in the best of ways, this even has gore from Sergio Stivaletti and music from Claudio Simonetti and this all pleases me. My quest to find horror made in this century from Italy continues!

Directed by Kenta Fukasaku, the son of Battle Royale director Kinji Fukasaku, this movie starts with a girl named Asuka wearing a rat mask and committing suicide by leaping off the roof of her school. 49 days later, a note brings her classmates together to be confronted by what seems to be her ghost.

But who does the mask belong to? Can it belong to more than one person? And will any of the students survive to see the next school bell?

I have to say, I’ve never seen a more adorable killer, a girl who loved to smile and who now leaves stickers and smiley faces on her revenge notes. Also, killing someone who doesn’t get a perfect score in karaoke is totally the modus operandi of a Japanese schoolgirl slasher.

It’s only 76 minutes long, which if you ask me, is the perfect length for a movie like this. Also, more scooters should blow up in films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

One of the few things that never rang true to me about Tron was that Flynn ends up as a CEO. Luckily, Tron: Legacy fixed that by telling us what happened next, all while keeping up the Tron legacy of being a hyped big deal and then not being seen by anyone except those that it was intended for before becoming a cult film that few talk about — if a $170 million movie can be a cult movie, that is.

Screenwriter Adam Horowitz, who wrote the story along with Edward Kitsistold, told Collider, “For us, it was if we’re going to revisit this movie and try to take it forward, we’re the children of Tron. We grew up on it. It informed us. It really helped shape us and get us excited about the possibilities of technology and film and all that stuff. It’s one of the reasons we’re doing what we’re doing – so in that way its like how can we approach this movie in a way that as writers we have an emotional entry point ourselves.”

The writers and director Joseph Kosinski — who made the Gears of War “Mad World” commercial and who will also direct the sequel to Top Gun — had to answer this question: ” In a post-Matrix world, how do you go back to the world of Tron?”

Where the first film glorified the world inside a computer, this film went in a different direction. To wit: finding the humanity that lives within a digital world.

I love that the first hints of this film appeared when tokens to Flynn’s Arcade were sent out and a site claimed that Kevin Flynn is alive, even though he has been missing since 1989. At San Diego Comic Con, a real Flynn’s was open and a rebooted light cycle was on display. I couldn’t wait until this film debuted with all this hype.

Twenty years after Flynn disappeared, his son Sam is ENCOM’s primary shareholder and he uses whatever power he has by releasing the company’s signature operating system online for free. Even though ENCOM executive Alan Bradley — who is Tron in the other world — approves of this, Sam is arrested.

A pager sends Sam a message to visit the dusty old Flynn’s Arcade, where he’s blasted into the video game grid just like his father. This brings him into conflict with the new MCP named Clu, as well as meeting his father’s apprentice Quorra.

I’m easy to please when it comes to Tron. All I needed was to see Daft Punk — who composed the score — show up as the DJs at the End of Line Club, the same place where original Tron creator and director Steven Lisberger appears as a bartender named Shaddix. And I adore that this movie ends with the digital world coming into our own, while lamenting that this is where the story — for now — ends.

We just bought a new house and let me tell you, if Becca had gone through what Cheng Lai-sheung goes through in this movie, she would have killed numerous folks too.

She has promised her parents — who were forced to move from their homes to make way for luxury real estate when she was a child — that she would get them a home some day. She’s already missed the opportunity to give her mother this gift, as she has died, but as her father is on his death bed, she has the goal of purchasing the Victoria Bay No. 1 high-rise.

The bank will only give her 70% of the money she needs and her father’s medical bills cost so much that she must take a second job, as those costs cut into her savings. Even her married lover refuses to help, so Lai-sheng allows her father to die one night so that the dream can come true.

Despite finally qualifying for the home, the owners raise the price again, at which point our heroine kills eleven people in a frenzy before cooly returning to work and demanding that the price be cut, as after all, who would want to live in a place where so many have died?

Josie Ho, who is Lai-sheung in this, decided that she wanted to make something as wild as Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki while director and writer Pang Ho-cheung wanted something a bit more in the realm of reality. The outcome? Someone fainted and two people threw up during its Italian premiere, which is pretty much a standing ovation in my mind.

Banglar King Kong is how the filmmakers of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh see Kong and let me tell you, there is no way that American audiences are prepared for this.

There are times within the film where footage looks thirty years old and as if it played numerous times in drive-ins through the southwest, with pops and lines and dust all over the film. And then there are moments when it appears to be video, mostly for the music numbers. Music numbers? Yes, Banglar King Kong is packed with them. And finally, there are moments where old school greenscreen and evil Photshopped stills with Ken Burns effect on them are used. It’s like a remixed multimedia film with the budget of a trip to the grocery store and every moment is astounding.

Somehow, this movie has a running time of two hours and twenty-three minutes but I didn’t notice. My wife walked in for a bit, saw Kong and said, “This is upsetting. This movie is the kind of thing that I don’t want to watch.”

This is a film where people wear black leather ensembles to a jungle adventure. The Fay Wray in this is curvy and has a splash fight with a guy in this that looks like it got out of hand and the camera never cuts away. And when Kong starts stomping on buildings before going to see stock footage of a carnival that had to be filmed decades ago, it only got better.

Sure, the theme from Gladiator is in this, the buildings go from rear projection to cardboard cutouts and remote control cars are used. But it has a real Kong mask that I assume that Amazon delivered to make this film happen and stock footage of explosions and human fistfights mixed with Kong going wild in a city and sometimes, the jump cuts are so nonsensical that they challenge even my brain.

At one point, I thought that the directing style of Çetin İnanç took a mindset shift that permanently broke my ability to watch movies the same way ever again. I can happily report that this movie does the very same thing, as time, place, scene, pacing and camera angles do not matter any more. This feels like it was assembled from the ghosts of a hundred other movies and the dream of making one, a blockbuster version of King Kong unlike any seen before or since.

The copy I found on YouTube has long stretches where artifacted video breaks into the picture and the sound struggles to keep up with it. There’s also a scene at the end where the Fay Wray character hugs a reverse projection of the big dead ape and she just stands there with her arms open.

I couldn’t love this movie any more that I do.

Please watch it on YouTube.

Herschell Gordon Lewis has informed both sides of my life, from his work in direct marketing teaching me the ways of marketing and his propensity toward making shameless exploitation showing me the ways of the world.

Directed by Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case) and Jimmy Maslon, this film takes you through the life of Lewis with the man himself speaking throughout. Plus, nearly everyone alive that had worked in his movies shows up and you also get to hear from John Waters and Joe Bob Briggs.

While this movie concentrates on the gore that everyone knows the man for, it also takes time to show his nudie-cuties, hillbilly and biker films, as well as delving into his love of fried chicken, which he made sure was on every single set. In fact, Colonel Sanders even shows up in Blast-Off Girls.

Sure, the movies of Lewis are cheap films that even he would not admit are art. After all, he was quoted as saying that he saw movies as a business and pitied anyone who saw it as an art film. But so what? His bally-hoo is something that movies no longer have. They also don’t have many Egyptian caterers ripping the tongues out of Playmates, but we can all dare to dream.