When I was around 12 years old, almost every weekend I’d walk the mile up the road to the closest Blockbuster and rent three or four movies, with its cult selection the best thing I had ever since Sound Warehouse shut its doors forever.

As basic as the small group of movies were, it did have the Shinya Tsukamoto film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a cyberpunk masterpiece of gray-matter metal, complete with a massive drill as a penile substitute. Shocked and awed, I copied the film on my VHS setup and watched it repeatedly for the next year, becoming a big fan of Tsukamoto in the process.

While I have seen many of his films since, the pseudo-period piece Gemini has always escaped my eyes until now, ultimately revealing his most challenging film yet. Based on the short story by Edogawa Rampo, it is set in the Japan of 1910 as former military doc Yukio (Masahiro Motoki) has settled down, now practicing private medicine and married to the charming amnesiac, Rin (Ryo).

With a plague destroying the surrounding slums, Yukio finds his upper-crust world crumbling when he saves a drunk politician instead of a poor mother and her baby. As a somersaulting man in dirty robes invades his house and kills his parents, Yukio soon finds himself stuck at the bottom of a well as the homeless villain — who looks exactly like him, by the way — takes over his life above.

While trapped, Yukio reverts to an animal-like state while the interloper, named Sutekichi (also Motoki), seduces said wife as we learn of the impoverished life and lusty connection they once had as well.

Utilizing a well-versed combination of classic filmmaking skills and industrial know-how, Gemini is an uncomfortable film, possibly more than any of Tsukamoto’s other kinetic flicks, if only for his ability to have his already-unlikable characters mechanically transform into even worse human-sized kaiju who can do more destruction than Godzilla and Gamera combined.

It’s something that, unexpectedly even for this type of film, is on full display here, both physically and emotionally. It’s pure grotesquerie that, if you’re able to connect with it, can leave anyone fully unsettled, just as much when I saw Tetsuo all those maggot-riddled years ago. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

After Stephen Sommers’ adventure-stuffed remake of Universal’s The Mummy made a mint in the summer of 1999, a wave of low-budget mummy movies hit DVD, including Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy, Bram Stoker’s The Mummy and, um, Tony Curtis in The Mummy Lives.

And then there’s The Mummy Theme Park. Containing all the enthusiasm its generic title can muster, it wasn’t so much released as it was dropped from director Alvaro Passeri’s rectum.

Are you ready for stunning ineptitude? (You’re not, no matter what you think. I’m just asking because I’m a polite host.)

So in Egypt, an earthquake reveals an ancient underground city filled with mummies. Naturally, a sheik (Cyrus Elias, Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound) does what anyone with do with such an archaeological find: Turn it into a theme park. And what will he name this vacation destination built to attract visitors from all reaches of the globe? The Mummy Theme Park. One assumes it wasn’t tested through focus groups.

Wanting to hire “the best” photographer ASAP to snap promo pics, the sheik — who looks like Nathan Lane dressed as Jafar on Halloween — flies Daniel Flynn (Adam O’Neil, in his only credit) and initially platonic assistant Julie (Holly Laningham, Fashionably L.A.) over from America. Daniel’s shutterbug experience seems limited to shooting topless women, but that fits right in with the sheik keeping a sizable harem, whose members sport inner-thigh “THE SHIEK” tattoos and say things like, “You think the sheik will like my boobs, hmm?”

Daniel and Julie get a thorough tour of the park by train, from the lab where corpses are “reanimated” via microchip (causing one skeleton to do a ha-cha-cha dance), to the concession area where the menu includes items like “Cream of Isis” and beer is dispensed tastefully through the beard of a pharaoh. Admittedly, the many, many POV shots moving along the tracks look cool, but that’s it; everything else looks false, because it is. Cars and trains are toys, and most of the movie utilizes either green-screen or rear-projection techniques for backgrounds. Fittingly, every line of dialogue is dubbed in post, yet using tones in which people don’t actually speak.

The supposed horror finally kicks in when a flash from Daniel’s camera triggers the microchip of a mummy, startling him to come alive and attack; the science totally checks out. This mummy can walk through walls. Being pursued by this Charmin-bound man, Daniel notices the mummy staring at Julie’s breasts, so he orders her to open her blouse to distract the mummy just long enough to be doused in a bucket of acid, conveniently nearby. By gum, it works!

Passeri’s 1994 debut, Creatures from the Abyss (or Plankton, if you prefer), enjoys a small, but solid reputation as a cheap chunk of cheese; The Mummy Theme Park goes one better in somehow being chintzier in every conceivable regard, most notably in the effects department. No greater representation of Passeri’s poor execution exists than when things gets goopy in the last 20 minutes. It’s one thing to see a guy get sword-sliced neatly down the middle like an MGM cartoon cat; it’s another to watch as a mummy grabs the testicles of a man whose face digitally twists in response, as if a Photoshop user navigated to “Filter > Distort > Twirl.”

Resist the urge to navigate your remote to “Eject” or “Power Off,” lest you miss the different kind of goop running through The Mummy Theme Park’s final frames: romance! After decrying the park for offending the memory of the pharaohs, the aptly named Queen of Eternity (Helen Preest) cuddles with a mummy in a train car headed to, one hopes, a love nest in which he can stare at her breasts without fear or risk of dissolution. We wish the same for your psyche. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Rumored to participate in murderous orgies — and, thus, under suspicion of satanic possession — five nuns are literally crucified by God-fearing town residents in 15th-century Sicily. Meanwhile, in Toronto — oh, and 500 years later — archaeology student Liza (Meg Register, Boxing Helena) makes contact with their souls during a séance, conveniently before she’s about to travel to Sicily with her professor (Brett Halsey, Return of the Fly) to excavate some ruins.

Once there, Liza expresses her desire to check out what remains of the nunnery, to which the prof replies, “We’re archaeologists, not morticians!” (With Demonia being a Lucio Fulci film, however, characters might have to be both.) The locals are not of the Welcome Wagon variety. And neither are the nuns’ vengeful spirits, as one poor fellow (Fulci regular Al Cliver, The House of Clocks) finds out aboard a boat named the SS Perversion (seriously) when he’s harpooned by a headless, topless ghost.

Other unfortunate demises hot off the menu in Demonia include a woman killed by her own cats, who tug at her eyeballs like they were orbs of yarn; a man attacked by a slab of meat, which repeatedly slams him against a wall like a rolling pin to Play-Doh; another man tied to trees that rip him in half, from crotch to crown, as his son watches in terror; and one flame-broiled baby.

These are the wicked, wicked ways of the Italian gore godfather in his contribution to the world of nunsploitation; this being his lone work in that subgenre, he sure as hell leans in — sometimes even literally, pushing the camera forward with each swing of a sledgehammer or assault by beef. Part of the fun of watching a movie by Fulci is seeing how far he’ll go; only in the depiction of the infant’s death does Fulci show any restraint, focusing on the tot’s teeny-weeny hand as the casually discarded bundle of joy burns like trash on a farm. By contrast, the guy pulled apart like human Laffy Taffy is shown in daylight, out in the open, in a wide shot; at no point does it look real, but that’s hardly the point.

Demonia offers the Fulci faithful more than enough gore to have them foam at the mouths, preferably not as colorfully as the yellow bile oozing from the ghost nuns’ collective cakeholes in the abrupt final scene of utter WTF-ery. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

As a teenager, while most of my peers thought that George Lucas or Steven Spielberg were the end-all, be-all of filmmaking, I instead spent most of my free time repeatedly renting and always watching the shot-on-video flicks of Todd Sheets, Tim Ritter and, my personal favorite, Ohio’s J.R. Bookwalter.

Perhaps best known for the zombie epic The Dead Next Door, it was the 1995 movie Ozone where I believe he came into his own, crafting a hallucinogenic tale of clean cops and dirty mutants in their own war for the titular designer drug Ozone and its nightmarish effects.

During an ambush with some drugged-out creeps, plainclothes policeman Eddie (former Cleveland Brown James Black) is injected with the mysterious narcotic. As he tries to track down the manufacturer, he begins to experience horrific drifts in and out of reality, including that of an underground fight club filled with Ozone-addicted monsters.

Designed by a grotesque blob in a basement with vague worldwide ambitions, the real reason why the drug has become so popular with maniacally obsessive users is more nefarious than expected, edging into dark religious territories I wasn’t anticipating.

While many of these backyard horror movies sitting on rental shelves were often more laughable than anything else, Bookwalter always seemed to strive for a look and feel that suited the very low budget instead of hindering it, oftentimes coming up with audacious films that played better than they really had any right to; Ozone exemplifies that.

In addition to Bookwalter’s direction, much of the film sets on Black’s broad football-player shoulders, forging an unheralded action hero plagued by demons, both literal and figurative. And while the film just exudes a ’90s sense of camcorder-based nostalgia, I realized it’s something that is sorely missed in these heady days of high-definition flicks shot and edited on a computer. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Warns the poster of Enter the Devil, “it’s too late for an exorcism!” But let’s give credit where credit is due, because director/co-writer Frank Q. Dobbs’ regional feature beat The Exorcist to theaters by a year — not that the movies are remotely similar, because this pic lacks possession, but a true exploitation filmmaker knows to use every trick in the book. (One of those tricks is retitling, which accounts for the alternate moniker of Disciples of Death, but don’t confuse this Enter the Devil with the Italian one better known on our public-domain shores as The Eerie Midnight Horror Show.)

After yet another hunter disappears in Brewster County, the sheriff (John Martin, The Tell-Tale Heart) sends Deputy Jase (co-screenwriter Dave Cass, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3) to sniff out some answers, what with it being an election year and all. That task takes Jase to a cabin outpost run by good ol’ Glenn (Joshua Bryant, A Scream in the Streets). It sits near the ol’ iron ore mine from the pre-credit sequence — you know, where the robed religious nutsos sacrifice the most recent missing hunter by tying him down with barbed wire, then flame-roasting him after piercing his heart with a big, black crucifix? Yep, that’s the one!

Shot in and around the Texas town of Lajitas (rhymes with “fajitas”), Enter the Devil has both the misfortune and fortune of making the UK’s “Video Nasties” list, presumably from the title alone — misfortune because the PG picture sheds hardly any blood, fortune because the notoriety helps keep the little film alive, which it deserves. With talk of border walls and acts of sexual assault factoring into the plot, it’s arguably (and accidentally) more relevant now than upon release.

Not to overpraise this venture from Dobbs (Uphill All the Way), but its homegrown Lone Star spirit and flavor grant it character a Hollywood treatment would likely polish beyond recognition. Rattlesnakes and rock formations carry automatic production value, as do members of the local-yokel cast. They speak a dialect too authentic to be fake, helping give the viewer a contact buzz from the cheap canned beers they slurp. You also can practically smell their acrid breath from their constant smoking, and feel the omnipresent dust leaving a grimy coat on your skin as it does theirs. When the robed cult members finally show the skin of their faces, you’ll hardly be surprised, but you’ll be satisfied. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.