DVD Reviews

Four films in, I think it is safe to say that Honey Island Swamp is getting crowded. Writer/Director Adam Green’s Hatchet series just crash-landed (and I mean that both literally and figuratively).  Hitting its stride in the second and third installment, Victor Crowley, an unneeded ...

Artsy kink.  This is what awaits you inside one of director Jesús "Jess" Franco best and most masterfully shot films. With Spanish-born filmmaker Jess Franco’s eerie feature, The Diabolical Dr. Z, things begin to get sexy and strange.  Truthfully, there’s no going back either as  ...

Holy Hatchets!  The moving severed limbs of one deceased wife attacking the people who plotted her basement murder are all you need to see in order to believe in the IMPACT of Amicus Productions.  Chop. Chop. Chop.  ...

Even primal therapy was never this raw. Produced and directed by Don Jones, the opening montage of china dolls set to a really cheesy song that, simply put, is beyond tortuous for its audience is just about the most disquieting way to begin this lurid tale of madness and murder ...

When this film was originally released NINE YEARS AGO, we really wanted writer/director Sam Raimi to be back in the business of scaring the pants off of us and making us howl with laughter. We got exactly what we wanted with Drag Me to Hell even if Raimi remained relatively ...

While it is way too slick in comparison to the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, New Line Cinema’s rebranding of the series – as confusing as that opening scrawl is – remains of interest because, originally set to be released as the 1980s came to a close, this film would ...

Code Red does fans of the Drive-In a very cool favor with the release of the Chaos and Don’t Look in the Basement double feature. While Don’t Look in the Basement has been released on Blu-ray previously, never before has the cult classic been presented in a twofer ...

A shell of a building. An empty room. And a line of monitors all tuned in to the same dead channel: a close-up of a corpse. It is the face of Don Luigi Costa, a religious man who gave up his vows after his horrible diagnosis. How bizarre! How eerie! How utterly unusual! What ...

Truthfully, New Wave would be nothing without certain bands. When I say DEVO you say what, ghouls and boils? The outfits? The music? Or is it the realization that Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO’s lead singer and untiring Hollywood composer, is a certified genius? Because Mothersbaugh ...

When in the jungle, it would be wise of happily married (and still sexually active) couples to actually keep the noises of their lovemaking down. It might attract all kinds of beasts once thought extinct…like the brontosaurus family at the center of Baby: Secret of ...

Cannibalism! Purification! And really shitty southern accents! Keep on giving us the EuroSleeze, Severin Films!  Banned in 38 countries for the dick slicing, women raping, and snake eating scenes of tasteless trash, Eaten Alive! finally gets a proper HD release.  And I couldn't ...

Out of the fire and into the meltdown! Threads finally makes its HD debut! Attack warning: RED! Attack warning: RED! Start the sirens. The bombs have been launched. You know it’s serious when classic works in our collective art history starts getting moved into ...

Picture it: composer Vic Mizzy, writer Robert Bloch (Psycho), director William Castle, actress Barbara Stanwyck and actor Robert Taylor; all together in the same film. Already I’m in love with this thriller from 1964. William Castle’s The Night Stalker is packed with a million ...

It begins with the longest piss ever. And it ends with a stuffed cat floating in a Florida swamp. Everything in between this trippy story about two hippy chicks hitching a ride is both sexy and surreal. There is a bizarre atmosphere surrounding this feature and it practically ...

"Hi, I'm Max Keller."  It's how each episode of this short-lived but beloved series kicks off.  And fans will be happy to know that Kino Lorber has done them proud with this 3-disc HD release, featuring newly remastered versions of some of  ...

Aliens in drag serving up a hot mess of sexploitation stew? A thousand times YES! Zombies from outer space have landed and they are in search of, at least in this movie, leggy lesbian protein packs on two legs. Luckily, the earth is loaded with these “easy” targets – especially ...

Gloves?! You want gloves? I’ll give you gloves!I don’t know when I first came to know the might and marvel of the swift-footed Penitentiary trilogy but I can tell you it was on a crummy clamshell-encased VHS copy ...

With this film, the mythos of The Gate closed for good. I love forced perspective but, man, this one is bit of a letdown. Directed by Tibor Takács, Gate II is a film that lives in the shadows of its gloriously entertaining predecessor. It has big shoes to fill and, unfortunately, it can’t ...

The Sect (also known as The Devil’s Daughter) proves that schoolteachers (of which I am one) probably shouldn’t be armed with a gun, let alone drive a car. Weird shit happens to us. The misadventure contained within The Sect, though, takes the cake thanks to a ...

What’s in the basket? Easter Eggs? Nope. Just my not-so conjoined wart of a twin! Wanna looksee?! Basket Case, my fellow fiends and gore-gore ghouls, is the demented story of one set of twins who simply do not play by the rules of the natural order. But you already knew that and, I suspect ...

One eye opens. The other opens. The credits roll and then the emaciated woman, putting her arms on the outside of the box she is lying on her back in, sits up. She is inside a satin lined coffin. And the scream she emits comes from the very pit of her stomach. She climbs ...

In the pre-dawn hours before John Carpenter’s Halloween was released and changed everything about horror films, there was The Redeemer: Son of Satan, a film so deliciously vile that it is worth mentioning alongside such sin condemning franchises like SAW, and, yes ...

One does not need much of an explanation when a spray of bullets is delivering his or her message straight out of a deafening M60 in the humid jungle. That message is often heard loud and clear. And, in The Last Hunter (the first Euro-sleaze-and-cheese flick to tackle ...

Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) are in for one hell of a fright night in writer/director Bryan Bertino’s stunning debut, The Strangers. Had these unfortunate victims not been home at the time that three sadistic killers came a-knocking then nothing ...

It is, of course, the thriller in which Karl Malden (On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Pollyanna, and One-Eyed Jacks) goes for the giallo. That’s right, even the former spokesman of American Express Travelers Checks sought solace in writer/director Dario Argento’s ...

I never would have thought that talking to a wig could be so damn enthralling. It turns out, in this heavily misogynistic film that got considerably lighter in tone once cinematographer Don Jones was tasked to salvage the original director’s bizarre work, that wigs – no matter ...

“Cut off my hand or you die!” screams one affected member of this cast when faced with the consequences of the devil’s left hand. It is only one line of dialogue out of any other such scripted nonsense that receives a loud guffaw from the audience. This b-grade flick, full of firewalking ...

It begins with a flat tire. A woman alone. She’s stranded on a lonesome highway. There’s a biker approaching and, after a lift into the woods, his demands are more than she’s prepared to give. He won’t be the end of her, though. What follows is a desperate run for freedom ...

Sending a scared coed flying through a bathroom door, the scaly giant-sized son of a bitch at the center of this monster flick really has it in for girls in shower stalls. Honestly, with crisp POV shots and attacking camera movements that show piercing bites on naked legs, the ...

“She’s down. Send in the ambulance.” Writer/Director Larry Cohen, you know him as the dedicated B-Movie auteur of horror and such science fiction films like Q: The Winged Serpent and It’s Alive, can always be counted on to deliver the b-movie madness. He’s simply ...