31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 17: "MANOS" THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)

A road trip takes a nasty turn when a family makes its way down a lonesome Texas highway and encounters a creepy house (that's not supposed to exist) populated by what's apparently some sort of polygamous satanic cult led by an undead sorcerer. Sounds simple, right? Oh, it's simple, but the finished film is a cinematic train wreck of epic proportions.

Made on a $19,000 budget by Harold P. Warren, an insurance and fertilizer salesman operating out of El Paso, Texas, the film came about as the result of Warren accepting a bet to make a horror movie. What resulted is unarguably one of the most incompetent works of cinema in history, and those who incorrectly cite PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) as the alleged "worst film ever made" would do well to see it for themselves so they can truly understand just how bad a movie can be, in literally every possible way. I shit you not, there is literally nothing in the entire running time of MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE that could be considered worthwhile, and that is precisely what makes it an object of fascination for me and its legion of gobsmacked fans.

The film  stars absolutely no one of note and every performance is about on par with what one could expect from a live junior high school theater production if the cast had recently discovered the joys of Percodan and red wine cocktails. Harold P. Warren heads the players as Michael, the father in the hapless family of vacationers, and to call his thespic chops "wooden" would be to insult all trees everywhere. Diane Mahree as Margaret and young Jackie Neyman fill out the mother and daughter roles, but they are simply there to be present and put in the way of the script's meager threats, and they consequently barely register as anything other than manikins. 

A gathering of thespic titans.

Anyway, upon arriving at the remote house that isn't supposed to be there, the family encounters Torgo (John Reynolds), the place's creepy concierge (or something) who speaks haltingly and staggers around on what appear to be satyr-like goat legs. (At least I think that's what they're supposed to be; the actual effect makes it look as though the actor has stuffed full rolls of paper towels down his pants to serve as exaggerated thigh muscles.) 

The immortal John Reynolds as Torgo, a performance for the ages.

To put it as kindly as possible, Torgo is one creepy motherfucker, and he informs the family that they are not welcome because "the Master is away," but he almost immediately changes his tune and states "the Master likes you." Understandably weirded out by all of this, the family opts to settle in for the night, but first they simply stand around doing nothing in the lodge's living room while admiring a portrait of the aforementioned Master. Oh, and the Master is also apparently dead, but not, so go figure. (It's never explained.)

Portrait of the Master (and friend).

As the night progresses, Torgo majorly pervs on the wife in a sequence that induces the douche-chills in all who witness it

and before things can get actually rapey, the Master (Tom Neyman) arrives from wherever the hell he was and decides he wants to add the wife and daughter to his harem of apparently undead wives and servants of the undefined-but-demonic entity, Manos.

The Master (Tom Neyman).

As the movie lurches toward its climax, the family dog is killed by something in the nearby desert, the Master's wives argue amongst themselves and engage in a catfight over whether or not to accept the wife and daughter into their ranks,

Hawt polygamous cultist action!

and Torgo gets called out for the pervy shenanigans he perpetrated upon the wives while they lay dormant, so the Master rips off and burns one of Torgo's hands before either banishing him or killing him. It's not really made clear.

The judgment of Torgo.

When all is said and done, the wife and daughter become brides of the Master (and, by association, Manos), Torgo is gone, and the hapless dad replaces Torgo as the lodge's concierge when two unsuspecting young women drive up to the place. THE END?

What you've just read is MANOS in a nutshell, and my review in no way begins to communicate just what a jaw-dropping complete and utter failure of a film it is. I left out describing the filler material involving a pair of highway cops who repeatedly harass a pair of teenagers who are perpetually caught necking in a sports car, and also did not go into how there are long stretches in which the cast just stands around looking confused while the soundtrack's madness-inducing music punctuates the absolute nothing that goes on. And speaking of the soundtrack, the film's audio was apparently lost or not recorded at all during filming, so the entire dialogue track is overdubbed, thus lending the movie the feel of a poorly-dubbed foreign import. It seems like time has either come to a standstill or is running backwards as the audience attempts to process what it is witnessing, and at the end one feels like they've just survived a three-day bender in a basement somewhere in Tijuana, fueled by homemade tequila, a few cases of expired Tecate, and several bottles of industrial-strength Mexican cough syrup.  No lie, it is awful, awful, AW-FUL, but once seen it can never be forgotten. 

And it must be pointed out that John Reynolds' performance as Torgo has to be seen to be believed. He's weird beyond words and his bizarre, halting delivery is reportedly due to the actor being seriously dosed out of his mind on LSD during shooting, and I, for one, absolutely believe it. Tragically, Reynold's committed suicide at age 25 via a shotgun blast to the head a month before the film's release.  If he had not taken his own life and had lived to see how the movie became a cult favorite upon being re-discovered after its now-legendary airing on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 in 1993, he'd have been hailed as bad movie royalty and would have made a fortune on the convention autograph circuit until the day he died. Anyway, MANOS is a must-see piece of cinematic detritus that only the most hardcore of bad movie enthusiasts tend to make it all the way through. Are you one of that hardy breed? Attempt the film for yourself and find out...

Poster for the American theatrical release.

 

 Yer Bunche, channeling the Master.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 16: PSYCHOMANIA (1972)

Due to my personal boredom with the media ubiquity of the undead over the past decade or so, I admit I've neglected zombie flicks in my annual Halloween horror movie roundup. Being completely fucking sick of the shambling hordes of flesh-hungry brainless ghouls, I sought out something a tad...different by way of a zombie offering. Thus I break out PSYCHOMANIA, the 1972 cult favorite by director Don Stark that fuses the biker genre — which was popular in Britain, but bore a completely different flavor than our own grungy, American homegrown variety of the form — with black magic and the undead. That said, PSYCHOMANIA, also released as THE DEATH WHEELERS, is certainly not a garden variety zombie movie, and therein lies its unique appeal.

Young Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) is a smug and privileged asshole of the highest order who happens to lead a motorcycle gang called the Living Dead, all of whom are instantly identifiable by their over-sized helmets that rock a visually-impressive skull motif. He and his pals ride around causing all manner of mayhem that's more annoying and anti-social rather than outright evil or violent — this being the Britain of the early 1970's, I would not expect something like what's found in movies like SATAN'S SADISTS or THE BORN LOSERS — and the police and locals hate their fucking guts but don't do much about them. It's implied that Tom's douchiness stems from his fascination with the mysterious death of his father, who apparently met his fate while dabbling in the black arts, and now Tom wants to barge into the mysterious locked room in his mother's inner sanctum, certain that he can succeed where his father failed and obtain the secret of eternal life. Oh, did I not mention that his mother (Beryl Reid) and her butler/companion (the great George Sanders) are hardcore occultists who command actual magic and hold real-deal seances for grieving families? (They do this as a not-for-profit public service, so at least there's something redeeming about them.) 

Upon braving the mysterious room, Tom emerges with the secret of eternal youth, which he immediately shares with his understandably skeptical gang. In order to gain that power, one must make a Satanic pact — in this case made by Tom's doting and rather witchy mother — and then commit suicide by whatever means available, only one must be absolutely secure in the belief that one will rise again. Undaunted by his gang's lack of faith in his plan, Tom offs himself by driving his bike off of a bridge at high speed into a river, and is buried by his gang in full leathers and helmet while perched atop his motorcycle.

The recently-deceased Tom (Nicky Henson), getting buried in style.

Perhaps a day or two thereafter, in what is probably the film's most memorable image (it was certainly the one all the kids I knew who saw it on TV during the 1970's talked about incessantly), Tom rockets out of the grave on his bike in broad daylight, covered in sepulchral earth, and immediately commences a campaign of mayhem by running over a totally innocent victim just for the thrill of it. When he reemerges to his stunned gang (of course after calling his mum's house to let her know he's back and quite well), Tom, having proven he was not full of shit about Satanic resurrection, sweetens the deal by letting them know "you can only die once," meaning that one of the perks of of the process is un-killable immortality. (And also, apparently in one instance, a modicum of superhuman strength.) Upon hearing that, the gang's distaff second-n-command excitedly exclaims, "Oh, man! What are we waiting for?!!?" and in no time kills herself and joins Tom's free-wheeling string of undead acts of mischief that becomes more and more murderous with each incident and with a flustered local police force unable to do a damned thing to stop the Living Dead once most of them follow Tom's suicidal and downright diabolical lead. (Some don't quite have enough faith in the process, so they don't make it). The sole exception to this is Tom's sweet girlfriend, Abby (Mary Larkin), who sees the evil in Tom and their cohorts and just can't bring herself to commit suicide and join in on something so unholy and, well, just downright rude. But the question is this: Just how does one quash a reign of terror committed by a pack of merry sociopaths who simply don't give a fuck about the law and cannot be killed?

PSYCHOMANIA is a black comedy played utterly straight in that way that only the British can achieve, so one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the film is serious upon seeing its poster and trailer. Tom's character is conceived as a study in post-A CLOCKWORK ORANGE McDowell-esque likable sociopathy/assholism,  and the antics of his gang probably seemed quite shocking to the pre-punk British mores of its era. Undead obnoxious oiks riding around on motorbikes with their state of immortal zombie-hood granting them that much more entitlement to be a pack of rude, childish dicks would be anathema to any right-thinking resident of the U.K. and they totally know it, even taunting the authorities with "What are you gonna do, kill me?" In short, it's a very British take on uncheckable motorbike delinquency as filtered through a horror movie context, social satire that's more eerie than actually scary.

Bottom line on this one: If you're expecting genuine scares, you should look elsewhere, but if you're looking for the blackest of offbeat black comedies, definitely give this a whirl. The scenes where the gang members kill themselves after seeing the proof of resurrection are very funny and the bit where one of them cheerily wakes up in the morgue, much to the gobsmacked shock of one of the medical examiners, is priceless.

Oh, and as previously stated, this film has rather a strong cult, mostly for the delinquent biker angle but also for its loopy nature. It's imagery can be found on t-shirts, leather jackets, tattoos, and even in a 1986 tribute song by one of my Top 5 favorite bands of all time, The Damned, so put that in your pipe and smoke it!      

Poster from the original theatrical release with the original title.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 15: CAGED VIRGINS (1971)

Scooby-Doo this ain't. 

After committing a murder (that we are told of in retrospect) while dressed as party clowns (don't ask), we meet our two lesbian protagonists (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent) as they, and a male accomplice, flee the authorities along the rural back roads of France. A gun battle ensues and the male is killed, so the girls leave the body in the car, which they then set ablaze, after which they set off into the desolate rural fields with no idea where they are. Their wanderings eventually lead them to a remote and apparently abandoned chateau that turns out to be the home of a cabal of vampires, their slaves, and several chained-up and naked women whom the slaves merrily molest, torture, and violate. After being bitten and mind-controlled by vampire bats, the girls witness the considerable debauchery perpetrated upon the prisoners in the dungeon only to awaken the next morning, themselves unharmed. When they attempt to escape, no matter which direction they may run, all paths lead back to the chateau. What horrible fate will befall our heroines, and why is the influence of the chateau keeping them there? Can they make it out alive, or is there a more sinister purpose at play? 

Originally released in its native France as REQUIEM POUR UN VAMPIRE, CAGED VIRGINS plays like a modern day Grimm's fairy tale for adults, as its story is a simple tale of two girls lost in the middle of nowhere and menaced by baleful forces. It has very little dialogue and allows the audience to witness the events without too much unneeded exposition, which renders roughly the first third of the film to be a very slow burn with the girls endlessly and silently wandering until they run into the vampires. But once the vampires show up, whoo-BOY, it's off to the races as the slaves avail themselves to the shackled nubiles. There's an extended sequence of softcore groping of damned near every inch of the prisoners' bodies, which are rendered naked as the slaves gleefully tear the meager clothing from the women. I can't speak for the rest of you, but I always find it comforting to see displays of Euro armpit hair and shaggy '70's bush, and this film is not stingy with those elements. Short of graphic closeups of genitals or penetration, anything goes, including flagellation and torment with lit candles, so keep that in mind if your tolerance runs more toward the vanilla. 

I should also mention a now-infamous shot of one of the captive being orally pleasured by a vampire bat, which brings up a number of ideas that even this film saw fit not to explore further. My first exposure to this film was seeing an image of the cunning linguist bat going to work in a coffee table book on Euro horror owned by a friend — an image his parents had no clue about, I can assure you — and it blew my mind. It took nearly fifty years for me to finally witness the movie for myself, and that image remains indelible. Hell, they even saw fit to include it in the trailers shown in U.S. grindhouses back in the days, and the sight of it must have gone over a treat with the regulars.

Shaggy '70's bush and a friendly vampire bat. Just another evening in the Gallic countryside.

Dripping with atmosphere and very European in its flavor and frank approach to sex and nudity, CAGED VIRGINS is definitely worth a look for the curious, but don't go into it expecting any scares or gore. All that's on its mind is its eerie dreamlike vibe and getting away with as female nudity and sex as possible. I have nothing against prurient material, but when I'm given what's supposed to be a horror film, I expect at least a bit of dark frisson.  Then again, this is reportedly typical of the output of director Jean Rollin, for whom this is but one of his forays into blending the nighttime world of the undead suckface with that of the softcore tenderloin cinema. Prior to this I had seen only one of Rollin's other vampire films, namely LA VAMPIRE NUE (THE NAKED VAMPIRE, 1970), which I found to be a crushing bore, but Rollin redeemed himself to me with this effort, and I now look forward to seeing where else he goes when exploring this niche of fetishistic horror. I mean, how do you top a pussy-eating vampire bat? I, for one, am quite curious to find out.

Poster for the U.S. release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 14: THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)

Old school vampire lore + boobs = Hammer film.

This first in Hammer Films’ “Karnstein trilogy” — comprised of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971) and TWINS OF EVIL (1972) — is far and away the best of the lot and deservedly made a horror star out of Polish-born Ingrid Pitt. Though rather tame by current standards, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS was just the hit that the ailing Hammer studio needed, fueled by a letter perfect combination of the usual Hammer tone and the then-new explicit rather than implicit lesbian angle allowable thanks to British censors shifting the “X” certificate from age sixteen and over for admission to eighteen and over (essentially equivalent to the MPAA’s “R” rating and allowing for nudity, simulated sex and gore, but not gynecologically detailed or pornographic content).

The haunting Ingrid Pitt as Mircalla/Marcilla/Carmilla Karnstein.

Based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella CARMILLA (1875), THE VAMPIRE LOVERS lays out the eerie events set in motion in the early 1800’s (I think) when a beautiful and mysterious woman (Ingrid Pitt) arrives in the Duchy of Stiri and works her way through the populace, killing off members of the local populace with her vampiric feeding. Her M.O. is to insinuate herself into the house of an aristocratic family and feed on that family’s virginal young daughter (who is invariably cute as hell) until the girl wastes away, presumably because of anemia, and then the sultry vampiress moves on to her next victim. The vampire in question is Mircalla Karnstein, the last of a line of undead suckfaces who were believed wiped out years earlier, and she operates under the anagrammatically rearranged monikers of “Marcilla” and “Carmilla,” as the possibly unwilling thrall of a mysterious horseback-mounted man in black (John Forbes-Robertson) who’s obviously a master vampire. First working her baleful magic upon the niece of General Spielsdorf (Hammer mainstay Peter Cushing, in a role that amounts to slightly more than a cameo), the vampiress soon moves on to the doll-like and smokin’ hot Emma Morton (the adorable ginger-tressed Madeline Smith, who sports a pair of alabaster Brit-breasts that you just want to latch onto with eager lips and tongue), and it’s that literally unnatural relationship that drives the movie.

Carmilla and Emma share a tender moment.

As the vampiress slowly drains away the poor girl’s life, members of the household gradually twig to what’s up, so it’s only a matter of time until Emma lies dead or Mircalla is thwarted. Let us not forget that Peter Cushing, cinema’s most notable and formidable Van Helsing, is in this flick, so it’s a no-brainer as to how things simply must turn out; following the miserable demise of his niece, Cushing’s General seeks the aid and advice of Baron Hartog (Douglas Wilmer), who some years earlier avenged the death of his own daughter by taking out what was presumed to be the last of the vile Karnstein clan, and from there it’s time to kick some fanged ass.

Though set in various identifiable European locales and sometimes foreign lands such as Egypt, the Hammer horror world may as well all take place in the same stylized realm, so instantly recognizable is their atmospheric style. Replete with isolated country back-roads, misty graveyards, busty peasant women in dairy-showcasing bodices — one of the things that got me into these films during my formative years — and lavish period sets and costumes that drive home the fantasy and bring to mind MASTERPIECE THEATER as filtered through a Dan Curtis sensibility, the Hammer efforts are as unique and fun as the Universal Studios that preceded them. The Universal influence comes as zero surprise since Hammer’s horror films launched from a template established by their Yank antecedents, starting in the 1950’s with gored-up re-interpretations of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, followed later by their take on the Wolf Man, and those films were always worth a look. Filled with terrific eerie visuals, including a great bit with an earlier Karnstein lady searching the graveyard for her burial shroud (without which she cannot return to her tomb) and two shocking beheadings by sword. THE VAMPIRE LOVERS has much to savor from both the visual and narrative standpoints, and its interest has only increased with each passing year.

Perhaps most renowned for its lesbian content, the film is nowhere near as shocking in that respect as it was some forty years ago, and when looked at today it reveals layers far more rich than its initial prurient value. Mircalla does not appear to enjoy her state as one of the undead and seems to commit her evil acts either as a result of being compelled to do so by the mysterious (and unexplained) man in black, the occasional basic need for sanguinary sustenance or simply out of a need to defend herself against those who have figured out what she is. When it comes to her relationship with Emma, what at first may seem predatory or a symbolic mission to destroy innocence in the face of the girl’s obvious and untried womanhood is revealed to be a genuine affection, and Mircalla prolongs the inevitable by feeding on a couple of unfortunate locals so she can enjoy as much time with her inamorata as possible. The scenes of sexual intimacy between “Carmilla” and Emma are tastefully handled and have an almost childlike innocence in their emotional content, at least until the vampiress kisses her way south — if you know what I mean and I think you do — as the camera remains focused on the wide-eyed and ecstatic face of Emma.

Which brings me to Ingrid Pitt. One of the short list of indelible female figures in pre-1980’s horror cinema, Pitt simply owns THE VAMPIRE LOVERS in much the same way as THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was Darth Vader’s movie and I simply cannot picture anyone else in the role of Mircalla (unless the film was remade with Monica Bellucci). Pitt’s vampire is graceful, somewhat terse unless interacting with the object of her desire, and wears an expression that’s a curious mix of indifference and resignation to her lot in un-life. Mircalla is definitely creepy, but there is some indefinable something about her that evokes sadness to such a degree that one almost cannot help but pity her despite the trail of carnage she leaves in her wake. Pitt is also extremely easy on the eyes and has an air of commanding elegance that is evident even when she’s sponging her nekkid self in a bathtub or frolicking topless with Emma during a preamble to their first Sapphic encounter.

As I stated previously, the film’s naughty content is tame by modern standards, and I sat there for roughly the first half hour wondering why the film received an “R” rating form its U.S. release after witnessing only the most minor display of blood and one bare tit from the general’s niece during a brief post-mortem medical going-over, but then the bathtub scene where “Carmilla” engages in initially innocent girl time with Emma came on and all was right in the world…

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is one of the last times when the horror engine that was Hammer fired on all cylinders, and it is very much recommended to horror fans and followers of the whole lesbian vampire sub-genre. Available on one of those reasonably priced MGM-released Midnite Movies DVDs in a double feature with the vastly inferior COUNTESS DRACULA, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is a very welcome must-have for aficionados and those looking to remember the days before vampires were ruined by Anne Rice’s pussification and that fucking TWILIGHT bullshit.

The marvelously cheesy poster from the American release. None of the stuff seen on this poster happens in the movie.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - DAY 13: THE SHALLOWS (2016)

When a surfing holiday goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Medical student Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), takes a surfing holiday to Mexico while grieving for her recently-deceased mother. Her mother's death has led Nancy to consider leaving med school, but serious pondering of that decision is put on hold as Nancy, following hours of surfing with friendly locals, is attacked by a massive great white shark that has been feeding on the nearby carcass of a humpback whale. Nancy's surfer athleticism and medical training allow her to survive and make her way to an exposed rock outcropping in the shallows, a mere 200 yards from the beach and safety, where she's just out of the water enough so that the apex predator cannot reach her. But the shark is mindlessly relentless — to put it very mildly — and it's only a matter of time until high tide renders Nancy easily obtainable...

Let's face it: When it comes to shark movies, JAWS (1975) was a rock-solid masterpiece of suspense and terror that defined the genre and set the standard, so pretty much every shark movie that came in its wake could not help but come off as feeble or a pale imitation by way of comparison. With that stated, I'll go out on a limb — or an isolated rock — and name THE SHALLOWS as probably the best of the post-JAWS shark-centric shockers. Its premise is the very model of narrative simplicity, set as it is in one remote location and peopled with an absolute minimum of characters, so what we really focus on is seeing just how Nancy will survive against what is for all intents and purposes a voracious sea monster of the most implacable order.

"Those goddamned Beach Boys are a pack of fucking liars!!!"

Seeming even more consumption-minded than the shark in JAWS, the great white found here just will not stop in its efforts to eat every fucking thing in its path, succeeding in devouring three other victims as it awaits its chance at taking Nancy. It's big, it's terrifying, and, thanks to modern special effects, it's a beautifully realized and downright nasty antagonist.

And since the other human characters are pretty much ancillary shark-fodder, Blake Lively is given a terrific showcase in which to shine. She imbues Nancy with a relatable humanity and disorientation in the wake of the character's mom's death, which only makes her clearing-the-mind-via-surfing-holiday gone wrong seem all the more terrible. It's also a very physical performance, and while Lively spends the film in a bikini and a subsequent leg-exposing body-glove, the hot chick factor is almost immediately forgotten as the shark enters the picture and Nancy proves herself tougher and more resourceful than you will ever be.

I love sharks and shark horror stories, and THE SHALLOWS easily makes it into my roster of Top 5 shark flicks of all time. No small feat, that, so give it a look. And bear in mind that it manages to be riveting and scary as hell with only a minimum of PG-13 gore. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Theatrical promo poster.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 12: JIGOKU (1960)

"Once drawn by that merciless wind, the fair youth of morning is at dusk naught but bones. In the end, all must die. Numberless are the sins committed on the way to death. For those sins, there may be punishment in the law. Some may slip through its net, but the awareness of sin cannot be escaped. Religion imagines a world after death, dealing punishment in place of the law. That world is Hell."

— opening narration

Theology student Shiro Shimizu (Shigeru Amachi) is engaged to Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of his respected teacher, Professor Yajima. He also maintains a strange relationship with the uber-creepy Tamura (Yoichi Numada), who seems to know the intimate and sometimes shameful secrets of all and sundry. Showing up uninvited to the professor's house as Shiro announces his intention to marry Yukiko, Tamura makes it clear to the professor that he knows of an atrocity that the man committed during WWII and leaves with Shiro. As Tamura drives Shiro home, Tamura lets on that he knows Shiro has been sleeping with Yukiko and asks him to consider the possibility that she may be pregnant. (The guy's a total buzzkill from the word "go.") 

Tamura (Yoichi Numada) and Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), on a road trip to a dire destiny.

Seconds later, Tamura runs over a drunk named Tiger Kyoichi, a leader of the Gondo yakuza syndicate, and drives away. Shiro demands that Tamura stop the car so they can see if the victim is alright, but Tamura stoically refuses and blames the accident on Shrio, citing that it would not have happened if he had not asked Shimura to deviate from his planned route of travel. While Shiro silently contemplates his culpability for murder if the man dies, the gangster's mother (Kyoko Tsuji), alongside his floozy girlfriend, Yoko (Akiko Ono), grieves over her son's corpse and vows vengeance should she ever find the hit-and-run perps. Upon reading of the hit-and-run in the paper the next day, Tamura could not give less of a shit if he tried, while Shiro tries to convince him to go with him to the police and turn themselves in. Tamura notes that Kyoichi was only some piece of yakuza scum and not worth the best years of their lives, but the guilt-ridden Shiro confesses the accident to Yukiko, who suggests that her father might know what to do. While on their way to see the professor, the cab the pair are riding in crashes into a telephone pole and Yukiko is tragically killed. After Yukiko's funeral, Shiro frets over whether he or Tamura will "win" their battle of conscience (or lack thereof) and finds himself hanging out in a sleazy nightclub, where he meets, picks up, and puts the bone to the yakuza's bereaved girlfriend (who is also revealed to be a heroin addict, in a narrative bid to up the vileness quotient). Yoko twigs to the fact that Shiro is one of her lover's murderers, so she reports back to the gangster's mother and, with the target now identified, the plot for revenge escalates.

As if Shiro were not already fucked up enough by his fiancee's untimely demise, he heads to a rustic retirement community upon being notified that his mother if terminally ill, and while his mother lays there slowly expiring, her husband cavorts in the very next room with some kimonoed hoo-er. (Yeah, this movie's a roller coaster ride of sunshine...) Suddenly, a cutie named Sachiko shows up and she happens to look exactly like the dead Yukiko (which only makes sense, as she's played by the same actress). Sachiko sent the letter that alerted Shiro to his mother's illness, and she is his mom's nurse, as well as the daughter of Ensai (Jun Otomo) an alcoholic painter who lives nearby and drinks heavily while painting a depiction of Hell. We also meet other assorted residents of the community, all of whom are quite sleazy and/or pathetic, and are each responsible for murders and other acts of awfulness in the past. Tamura, the professor, his wife, the yakuza guy's mom, and the yakuza guy's lover all converge on the retirement community and in short order all are killed, via natural death, suicide, a fall from a great height, hanging, consumption of rancid fish and poisoned wine at a party, gunshot wounds, or strangulation. Thus, every fucking character in the story is consigned to Jigoku, which is the Japanese word for Hell. Well most of them go to Hell, but I'm getting to that...

When I first sat through JIGOKU — aka SINNERS OF HELL — I was disappointed to discover that it's basically a slice-of-life drama focusing on the sleazy doings of some Japanese folks in 1960 whose climax features an infamous depiction of the culture's concepts of Hell and what becomes of those whose vileness during life earns them a one-way ticket to eternal damnation. Loaded with enough sleazy characters and situations to fuel several schlocky soap operas, the melodrama just keeps on coming, piling on atrocious behavior after atrocious behavior with the kind of glorious excess for which Japanese cinema is renowned. In fact, things get so over-wrought that it all verges on self-parody. But the most bizarre aspect of this flick is its dual nature as a two-way mind-fuck of a film. If one approached this movie knowing absolutely nothing about it, it at first reads as a straight drama picture, which is totally understandable, but then it turns into a balls-out gruesome and gory festival of the torments of the damned brought to life. It's like someone swapped out the last reel for the ultra-nasty and surreal final twenty-plus minutes of an unabashed horror movie.

Just one of the creepy images seen once the film quite abruptly turns into a straight-up horror movie.

Upon his death, Shiro ends up in Limbo, where he again sees Yukiko, who tells him she was pregnant with his daughter, whose soul has been sent along the river into the underworld, so Shiro must brave the horrors of Hell itself to save her. What follows is a journey through hideous punishments, tortures, and other such wholesome sights, coupled with a few shocking revelations along the way. Packed with creepy and gore-filled imagery, the Hell sequence features a cornucopia of folks being graphically beheaded, sawn in twain, flayed, disemboweled, tormented by naked temptresses, being boiled in oil, impalement, tongues torn out, walking barefoot through a landscape of three-foot-tall glass shards, and the general hopelessness of existence. 

Not even Hammer films went there like this back in 1960, so once again Japan delivers.

Even by today's standards, some of this stuff is very extreme and disturbing, and it's worth making one's way through all of the soap opera mishegoss just to get to it. That said, the ending is simultaneously disappointing and corny, but the film overall packs serious balls and must have been quite a shock to Japanese audiences in 1960. And if you're wondering why you've never heard of this movie, despite there having been a ton of Japanese horror and sci-fi flicks released in the States during the 1960's, trust me when I tell you that this film's content did not have a hope in, well, Hell of ever getting past American censors. Even without its visceral diabolical slaughterhouse segments, the film's adult content would have been tough for watchdogs of media decency to let by, and an edited version would have ended up as a very short and incomprehensible mess.

Though its 100-minute running time may occasionally seem to drag a bit, which has a lot to do with the film's utterly joyless/hopeless tone, JIGOKU is never boring and the final reel makes it worth a look for all horror completists.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 11: THE DAY I DIED (1977)

When a bitchin' day at the beach goes horribly wrong.

"The day I died was a great day for the beach. One of those super days... All bright and sunny... I was feelin' real good. Proud, too... 'Cause this was my car! I'd only had it a week. I bought it with my own money, money I'd earned working after school at the supermarket. You know, as a bag boy. I'd been saving up for this little old car for so long... Now, I was getting a real bang out of showing it off..."

-the incredibly ominous opening narration

A 17-year-old boy is psyched to go to the beach in the car he'd just bought a week previous, and he has a fun day with his young pals. Then things go to the Dark Side when one of his buds breaks out a 7-Up bottle full of vodka he'd swiped from his folks, and the liquor gets shared by the group of five happy-go-lucky teens. As the day winds down and the bottle is emptied, the kids leave, and our 17-year-old narrator, who freely admits that he "was not used to the stuff," drives off in his car by himself, the other preferring to leave with his buddy Joe, the supplier of the vodka. While attempting to pass an old lady in a Mercedes, our nameless narrator meets his fate in a tragic car accident...but continues to narrate the events following his body being hauled out of the twisted wreckage, including his parents coming to the morgue to I.D. his corpse, his friends and family mourning at his open-casket wake (where his body shows zero signs of having been in a terrible vehicular wreck), and finally his coffin being slowly lowered into the waiting grave at his funeral.

Parental anguish...or disgust over their now-dead son being a dumbass?

Having not seen one since maybe 1979, I have no idea what automotive safety films geared toward teens about to get their driver's licenses are like these days, but the ones aimed at my generation and those that came before were nearly always morbid exercises in cheap (but effective) scare tactics and often unintentional hilarity. THE DAY I DIED is a prime example of the genre, only minus the lingering shots of simulated gore found in many other examples, but what it lacks in gore it more than makes up for with over-wrought cheap shots to the emotions. 

One would think that anyone could relate to the short's events, what with a nice kid's day in his just-obtained car being spoiled by his booze-induced premature demise, but to many of us who grew up in the suburbia of the late-1970's and early-1980's, the details of the inciting incident don't necessarily add up. While it's clear that the group of five kids involved are alluded to as having a certain amount of experience with alcohol, save for our narrator, who admits he's a lightweight, if one does the math, it seems unlikely that one bottle of vodka divided five ways among kids consuming it with food would be enough to hamper a driver's ability unto the point of fatal lack of automotive control. Admittedly, I'm no expert, but I did grow up in Westport, CT, where hard partying was my youthful era's rite de passage, and I can tell you from personal experience that even a wine-bottle-sized container of vodka would be unlikely to render a pack of five kids from my community non-functional. And even if it did, there would have been at least two within the group who would have recognized that they or their friends were fucked-up and would not have allowed them to drive under those circumstances, either waiting it out for a modicum of sobriety or taking a bullet and calling parents for an assist.

Bummer. Way to harsh your buzz, dude...

But enough of the logistics. This sort of thing was made to scare the fuck out of kids who did not know shit from shinola, and as such I can see it being quite effective when deployed toward the youth of the disco era. Its protagonist (who is never named) is of the typical Californian surfer-stereotype mythologized in many pop music hits of the 1960's, so his "golden boy" archetype was deeply etched into the consciousness of the American public of its time, and seeing such a fresh young Adonis snuffed out before he'd even truly begun to live could be quite the narrative gut-punch to an auditorium full of innocent minors. But when seen from the perspective of a far-more-jaded 21st century viewer, THE DAY I DIED is a masterpiece of unintentional hilarity in the guise of scare film horror. The voice acting begins matter-of-factly enough but as events take a turn for the morbid, our narrator goes for the jugular with world-class histrionics as he — now a corpse — laments making his parents and friends witness him laying there bereft of life, eventually shifting to full-on escalating pleading/sniveling mode as the funeral guests slowly file away and his coffin is lowered into the earth:

"Is this the end? The end of everything??? Don't go away and leave me all alone... Mom... Dad... Don't go away... I... I tell you, I'm not dead! Not really dead! Please don't put me in the ground! I promise... If you give me one last chance, God, I'll be the most careful driver in the whole world! I'll never take a drink like that again! All I want is one more chance! Please, God!!! I'm only seventeen!!!"

And then the film simply fades to black.

I know all of this sounds utterly horrible, and it certainly is, but if you have even the slightest tinge of darkness to your general sensibilities and sense of humor, the entire short comes off as a brilliant, cliche-ridden parody of this type of cautionary film, and as such it's a must-see. It goes to show you just how fucked-up I am, because when I meet my inevitable fate, I demand that this short be run just before my wake's boozy dance party, a balls-out celebration that will kick off with Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang."

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026-Day 10: SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO (1962)

Just another day for El Santo.

Mexican horror from the early1960's is a cornucopia of cheapjack atmosphere, cheese, and sheer weird craziness that at times feels like it spewed forth from the brain of a child who was out of his mind during a serious fever. Heavily influenced by the look and feel of the classic Universal horror cycle and more than a little of the then-current Italian flavors, these south-of-the-border shockers overflowed with vampires, lycanthropes, Frankenstein-esque man-made-monstrosities, mummies, mad scientists, random cutlery-wielding madmen, and malevolent space aliens, and on many occasions those baleful ne'er-do-wells were righteously opposed by luchadores, Mexico's signature masked professional wrestlers-cum-superheroes. Those paladins brought a distinctly Mexican cultural angle to the proceedings and created a popular sub-genre that positioned them as the country's de facto defenders against the forces of diabolical evil. Mil Mascaras, Neutron, the Blue Demon, and numerous others put their boots up the asses of malevolent and beastly creatures, but none took to the challenge with the diligence and longevity of El Santo ("the Saint"), or simply Santo for short. 

El Santo.

El Santo was real-life pro wrestler Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta (1917-1984) and by far the most famous and popular wrestler in Mexico, so his expansion into entertainment areas outside of the squared circle was inevitable. That leap was made to the cinema and El Santo headlined 49 (!!!) films between 1958 and 1982, with only three making it to the States in dubbed form, and the masked hero re-christened as "Samson." The most well-known Santo movie in the U.S. is arguably SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO, aka SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN, and when weighed against the quality of much of Santo's filmography, it's hands down one of his best. (NOTE: The Santo movies are all cheesy, to varying degrees, so take the praise I bestow upon this film with that in mind.)

The titular vampire women.

When a cabal of female vampires awaken after two centuries, their queen, Thorina (Lorena Velázquez), dispatches her minions to complete a goal that was interrupted two-hundred years previous by an ancestor of El Santo. (NOTE: Depending on the film, Santo is something of an Eternal Champion type, an old presence reborn in each era to fight a never-ending battle against diabolical forces.) Their objective: Find the reincarnation of a woman who had previously been chosen to take over from Thorina and also become the bride of Satan himself. The modern day incarnation is the daughter of a respected professor who's absolutely not down with his little girl becoming the thrall of Hell, so he calls in his old pal El Santo to put much wrasslin' boot to undead suckface ass.

The rest of the story plays like a live-action installment of SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU?, only with real monsters, and the Scooby Gang swapped out for a badassed Mexican wrestler in a silver mask. The vampire women and their male slaves get up to all manner of shenanigans that Santo inevitably thwarts in a kid-friendly way — the scares are mild and largely atmosphere-driven, and there's no gore — but there are a few truly memorable visuals to be had. There's a great bit where one of the vampire slaves is fleeing the scene of some evil that he committed, only to come face-to-face with a huge cross mounted in a churchyard that spurs him to use his cape in a futile attempt to shield himself from its influence, but to no avail. He bursts into flames, falls over, and burns out on the sidewalk. But the true highlight is when one of the vampire slaves takes the place of a wrestler who's slated to engage with Santo in the ring, and when it becomes clear that Santo's going to come out the victor and remove the evildoer's mask — the ultimate defeat in Mexican wrestling culture — when the mask comes off, the vampire is revealed as... A WEREWOLF!!!

What would Rowdy Roddy Piper have had to say about this?

The werewolf/vampire then proceeds to go buck wild in the ring and the mayhem is indeed glorious in its sheer ludicrousity.

SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO was only the seventh of the Santo films and being of such a relatively early vintage, it had yet to become the kind of lazy, ultra-low-budget, rote time-waster that the majority of later entries ended up as, and sitting through it feels like watching a slower-paced tequila-infused analog to the old school Universal monster flicks. Best known nowadays for the treatment it got on a 1995 installment of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, the film is totally worth sitting through in its straight version, if for no other reason than to experience the flavor of kooky monster-laden fun of the kind they just don't make anymore. VIVA EL SANTO!!! 

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 9: MOTHER'S DAY (1980)

There's nothing like backwoods hospitality...and this is NOTHING like backwoods hospitality.

The "wrong place, wrong time" sub-genre, in which innocent people meet appalling fates when outside of their familiar environment, has yielded some particularly twisted fruit for decades. PSYCHO, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DELIVERANCE, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, SOUTHERN COMFORT, EDEN LAKE, the list goes on and on, but the example of this niche that came as an interesting effort at the dawn of the 1980's slasher era was the indelible MOTHER'S DAY. 

Every year, a trio of college friends — Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce), and Trina (Tiana Pierce) — get together for a retreat to some location where they can catch up, reminisce, get high, and reaffirm their deep bond, coming away from the experience knowing full well that while other aspects of their lives may come up lacking, they will always have each other's backs. This time around the women decide to camp out for the weekend in some remote, wooded area of New Jersey, only to unwittingly find themselves in the territory of punk-rock-loving Ike (Holden McGuire) and disco advocate Addley (Billy Ray McQuade), a pair of insane brothers who do unspeakable things to interlopers simply because they can, all with the enthusiastic and supportive approval of their aged mother (Rose Ross). Operating in the middle of nowhere, discovery by the authorities is a virtual impossibility, so if Ike and Addley get you, you're done, and inevitable death is the very least of your worries. 

Ike (Holden McGuire) & Addley (Billy Ray McQuade): "Punk sucks!" "Disco's stupid!!!"

Shortly after their arrival at a chosen campsite, the women are abducted during the wee hours of the night and hauled to the ramshackle abode of the sociopathic family, where they are to be systematically brutalized for their captors' amusement. With their sensibilities informed by junk culture, the boys set up role-playing scenarios that humiliate their terrified victims before savage beatings and rape, and Jackie, the group's sad sack, is unlucky enough to be picked as the first "participant." While her bound and gagged friends watch helplessly, Jackie is battered and raped by Addley while Ike merrily snaps Polaroids, after which the boys are allowed to keep her in their room overnight, though their mother cautions them about being too tired the next morning. (*shudder*) On the following day while the boys train, Abbey and Trina  manage to escape, dragging the unconscious/in shock Jackie along, but Jackie soon dies from her abuse, so her friends steel themselves for a trip back to the home of their tormentors to grant them the gift of vengeance every bit as savage as the degradation that was inflicted upon them. And then some. Oh, and what about the possible presence of the legendary Queenie, the hairy and bestial sister of Mother?

Mother (Rose Ross) proudly surveys her sons' handiwork.

Opening a mere four months after the genre-defining FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), MOTHER'S DAY was likely already in progress when its more influential contemporary hit the nation's screens, but it would not be impossible for it to have been rushed out in an effort to capitalize. The only real set is the mad family's house, a residence that looks just a little bit more put-together than an actual run-down derelict in the middle of the local woods, and the gore — effective though it certainly is — would not have required more than a few hours of pre-filming preparation, so for all I know MOTHER'S DAY could have been shot over a period of about a week. Anyway, it appeared seemingly overnight in the wake of FRIDAY THE 13th and wielded considerably more mystery to us under-age would-be attendees because instead of a straight MPAA rating it bore one of those warnings that amounted to a self-imposed "X." Not even the slaughterhouse thrills of FRIDAY THE 13th went that far, so MOTHER'S DAY must have been really nasty! Sadly, none of us kids stood a hope in hell of seeing it during first-run, so we had to hold out until it hit VHS years after the fact, but it turned out to be worth the wait. 

By the time I and my peers finally got to see MOTHER'S DAY, we'd experienced most of the cookie cutter slasher flicks that helped define the zeitgeist of our generation, so we expected just another splattery ninety minutes of farming tool-fodder trotted out to sate our gorehound appetites. After close to a decade of the likes of the turgid HUMONGOUS, a succession of ever-worsening FRIDAY THE 13th sequels, and the unintentional hilarity of NAIL GUN MASSACRE, we had learned not to expect such luxuries as plot or characterization, so MOTHER'S DAY came as something of a surprise. Yeah, the trio of protagonists could pass for escapees from any number of post-collegiate reunion/nostalgia flicks, and the villains were like an even more nightmarish version of characters straight out of a vintage E.C. horror comic (only writ more explicit thanks to a pop-cultural distance of nearly thirty years), but they all had distinct personalities that made them interesting and worth spending the film's running time with. Ike and Addley fascinate me because of what we see of their family dynamic when they're not out murdering and raping. 

A nutritious breakfast with Addley and Ike.

They're like any other rough-and-tumble brothers; childish, ever-bickering and blame-casting,

engaging in an amusing perpetual debate over the relative merits of punk as opposed to disco, with only their physical age and grown-up bestial lusts belying their seeming perpetual pre-adolescence, with only their equally-warped mother wielding control over their borderline-feral wildness. They are true cases of arrested development, a state ensured by their controlling and needy mom, and their state is not at all helped by what appears to be a certain degree of mental retardation or the results of heavy-duty in-breeding. In short, they are man-child animals of the worst, most dangerous order; vile, all-too-human forest-dwelling bogeymen who know every inch of their backwoods home, and it is their non-supernatural humanity at its most base and lawless that makes them prime nightmare fuel. Their mother is certainly no slouch in the creepiness department, but her doting offspring make her look like a paragon of compassion and gentility.

MOTHER'S DAY is nasty, mean-spirited, and downright reprehensible in many ways, but I'll be damned if I don't find its every frame to be compelling stuff. It's my favorite of the many "city slickers vs. rednecks" movies and I recommend it to those who can handle its unsavory charms. All others are advised to stay out of the woods.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 8: LEMORA — A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973)

Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith), the most innocent of the innocent, discovers things the church never warned her about...

Sometimes it's all right there in the title.

13-year-old Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith) is the beautiful daughter of a Prohibition-era gangster, a violent gunman who is a fugitive from the law after committing a double-murder. The girl has been raised in the church by a devout reverend and is as innocent and pure as the driven snow, but she still harbors affection for her criminal father. While on the lam, Lila's dad finds himself in the sinister town of Astaroth, where he is waylaid by a pack of vampires, and soon Lila receives a letter from him, urging her to visit him. Knowing her guardian would not approve, Lila runs away into the night, making her way to a depot where she catches a bus to Astaroth, a journey punctuated with ominous warnings from a creepy driver. As the bus passes through Astaroth's nearby swamp, the vehicle is beset by some especially-bestial roving vampires, causing the bus to crash. Upon awakening, Lila finds herself in the care of Lemora (Lesley Gilb), an imposing woman in black who lives with a number of ever-giggling and menacing kids. Innocent though she is, Lila swiftly becomes aware that Lemora is a queen vampire and that the entire town is overrun with vampires, including what used to be her father. Trapped in the town's perpetual night and surrounded on all sides by undead suckfaces, can Lila's purity and piety guarantee her survival?

Hell is for children.

LEMORA — A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL is exactly what its title proclaims, namely a horror film that operates within a childlike realm of terror. The entire film looks and feels like a kid's fever dream of dark places, ominous grownups, scary children and, of course, vampires (that further mutate into even worse creatures), and to me it comes off like what you might get if you allowed a particularly together eight-year-old to script and helm a horror movie. It's shocks are strictly of the PG-rated variety but the lack of gore and violent action are more than made up for by a pervasive mood of a nightmare being acted out before our eyes. 

Creepy old crone Solange (Maxine Ballantyne), whose eerie a capella song about an old woman — possibly herself — is one of the film's highlights.

The acting is just broad enough to strike the delicate balance between child's-perspective exaggeration that works in the film's favor and over-the-top self-parody, and the performance of exploitation mainstay Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith is letter-perfect for the material. Like I said, it's basically a crazed kiddie film, and there are innumerable children's movies where little girl characters are played by adult women, so Smith's natural waifish look made her ideal as Lila. She's clearly around sixteen or seventeen at the time of shooting the movie but she is totally believable playing a few years younger, and she exudes innocence on a collision course with unholy corruption. And speaking of corruption, the film features a strong lesbian subtext as Lemora attempts to seduce Lila to the Dark Side. Though couched as attempts at swaying Lila to willingly submit to becoming Lemora's undead, eternally-beautiful companion, adults will no doubt twig to the predatory sapphic vibe that Lemora puts forth, especially during the sequence where she bathes Lila while slipping her a drugged libation.

Seldom has getting squeaky-clean felt so dirty...

Lemora herself, while a ruling vampire, is far from the most evil examples of her breed. Yes, she's macking on an underage girl, but she's quite pleasant, which serves as an intriguing counterpoint to her chalk-white complexion, black-clad Victorian spinster/librarian look and obvious vampiric presence. Sure, she feeds on children who eventually become her undead, eternally-young minions, but she feels unease at the weird vampires who run rampant in the local wild, a pack whose alarming disfiguring mutations are a direct physical manifestation of the innate evil that lay within them before they were turned. In fact, it seems that her goal in seeking Lila's vampiric transformation has a lot to do with Lila's unabashed innocence, which would allow her to not physically degenerate like the hideous wild suckfaces. We fear Lemora solely because we know what she is and what she is capable of, not due to any truly aggressive nastiness on her part. She consumes human blood solely in order to survive, and she appears to be quite lonely, so she's actually somewhat sympathetic. That aspect really struck a chord in me when I saw the film as a youngster, and I consequently never forgot it.

Who can't relate to the need for companionship?

LEMORA is very much within the same territory as the kid-oriented INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), and the two would make for a cool double-feature for one's children on a rainy afternoon. (I suggest paying attention to your kids' reactions if you opt to run the films, mostly to see the look of "What the fuck?!!?" on their faces when confronted with the films' bizarre, oneiric twist endings.)

Cover art for the DVD release.