Cards of Death answers the burning question of “What did we as a nation do before online gambling?” with a chorus of “We paid to join underground tarot card games in which we all got to bang a hooker as part of our admission fee, got to don rubber Halloween masks to protect our anonymity, and, assuming we won, got to kill the loser with the host’s weapon of choice.”

And character actor Will MacMillan (1976’s The Enforcer) captures the searing tale in his one and only feature behind the camera, albeit a video camera. He directs, writes, produces and delivers — exactly what is up for debate.

MacMillan also acts, opening the movie as police captain Twain, cigarette lighter in hand as he infiltrates the shadowy warehouse serving as the deadly game’s ersatz Bellagio. Quickly snared by the mastermind Hog Johnson (Robert Rothman), Twain is tied up and teased by a topless, swastika-cheeked sidekick (Tawney Berge) who refers to herself in the third person as she demands he suck her nipples. When he defiantly spits on them instead, she slices off his nose, an ear and a couple of fingers with a cheese peeler; a package of these appendages is dropped off at the police department just to fuck with them.

Twain’s enraged close cop friend, Gunny (Shamus Sherwood, a fifth-rate Tom Atkins), recruits Twain’s artist son (Ron Kologie, Iced) to help investigate Twain’s disappearance and the game’s regular trail of corpses. Meanwhile, Hog and his sexy better half, Cat (Carlissa Hayden), have sex twice — once even consensually — and crush a woman with a moving wall — or as much as a penny-jar budget will allow.

Just when I thought Herschell Gordon Lewis really could have done something with this premise, Cards of Death more or less admits to the same by name-checking the Godfather of Gore. Spare though they are, the bloody effects make it clear MacMillan was influenced by Lewis. The primary colors saturating the warehouse scenes suggests MacMillan also aimed for Dario Argento, but landed at Sargento, thanks to a mishandling of story threads and a dearth of narrative focus.

Still, credit where credit is due: MacMillan clearly tried, which is more than one can say of the average shot-on-video project, and although most of the actors never had a role before or after, none half-asses his or her part — not even the elderly street prostitute Grandma (Elizabeth Kingsley). To paraphrase Kenny Rogers, the too-long Cards of Death doesn’t know when to fold ’em; the proof is in the slapstick coda at tonal odds with all that comes before it. —Rod Lott

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Picked up and released by Troma, which just about says it all, Jessicka Rabid is the kind of irredeemable, hateful trash that gives horror films a bad name. The mute Jessicka (Elske McCain, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead) is literally treated like a dog by her male cousins-cum-captors (Mega Scorpions’ Jeff Sissons and The Pact II’s Trent Haaga). She is kept caged, fed dog food, hosed down in the bath and, when she needs to do her business outside, leashed by the neck. Every now and then, she is drugged so she can be pimped out to a porn director (played by this movie’s director, Matthew Reel).

And then there’s a lesbian scene in which Jessicka is seduced by the ol’ “peanut butter on the nipples” trick. Finally, she turns the tables on her masters. And the point is …?

I could not find one, other than a means for misogynist, filth-wallowing by featuring-debuting Reel (following such aggro shorts such as American Asshole and All the French Are Whores). The viewer would feel as used as McCain, if not for the fact that she co-wrote the damn thing with Reel, so you feel used for her.

A strong argument against DIY movies, Jessicka Rabid does have one tick mark in the plus column: the pun of its title. Whereas Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Jessica Rabbit was famous for purring, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way,” Jessicka Rabid is drawn to be bad. —Rod Lott

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In the late 1980s, the short-lived The Popcorn Kid was your basic multicamera, laugh-tracked CBS sitcom. Set in a movie theater, it focused on the camaraderie among the young employees. Some 20 years later, Midnight Movie reminded me of that series, except none of The Popcorn Kid’s six episodes featured someone getting his or her heart literally ripped out.

Midnight Movie’s simple plot is not unlike Lamberto Bava’s Demons, with moviegoers trapped in a theater late one night, chased by killer demons. Now substitute “killer demons” with “a raging lunatic,” and voila! Said nutcase is Radford (Arthur Roberts, 1988’s Not of This Earth), a one-time B-movie director who’s in an insane asylum after becoming unhealthily obsessed with his 1970s horror cheapie — so obsessed that it pushes him to a literal bloodbath, slaughtering the staff and making his escape, never to be seen again …

… until a few years later, when a single-screen theater is showing his film that very night, to an audience of less than a dozen. They’re into the badness of it all, and then they become part of it. One by one, they’re killed by the film’s masked madman, and their deaths are projected seamlessly as if part of that original black-and-white movie; their friends sure are slow to realize what’s going on — amused where we would be apoplectic.

A movie-within-in-a-movie concept is always welcome, but a picture must have something more than just that, or it risks gimmickry. Because all but a slim fraction of director Jack Messitt’s cast are woefully amateurish, Midnight Movie embraces that risk. Besides, can’t gimmicks be a blast?

Absolutely, and Messitt gets a charge from viewers who remember the joys of old-school theaters, where one or two titles played, tops, making the experience more communal. Ironically, while widening your viewing options, multiplexes have sapped the fun out of going to the movies (and don’t get me started on audience members’ phones). It’s not what it used to be. Midnight Movie also celebrates the conventions of the B picture, becoming every bit as predictable as its cat-and-mouse chase in an enclosed setting, but with the added, contemporary bonus of bright and colorful bloodletting.

After a while, its repetitive nature may wear on you, but at least this slasher dares to do something different from the get-go. That it can’t entirely pull that off is more to blame on its minuscule budget than anything else. For those viewing the DVD’s alternate “Killer Cut,” note that the opening credits cite Mr. Radford as editor. That’s your first clue not to take this flick too seriously. —Rod Lott

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Leave it to Mexploitation king René Cardona Sr. (Night of the Bloody Apes) to deliver the single Santo movie with something the other four dozen or so do not have: sex. It’s even in the title: El Vampiro y el Sexo.

Although a nuclear physicist by trade, Dr. Sepulveda (Carlos Agostí, Guns and Guts) dabbles in the metaphysical. And who should partner with him on such studies but that noted scholar, Santo (Santo), lookin’ sharp in a two-piece business suit and, yes, his sparkly wrestling mask. To Dr. Sepulveda’s assembled guests, Santo discusses his theory of “dematerialization,” by which people can be sent back to their previous lives, and — oh, hey, he just so happens to have built a reincarnation time machine in hopes of doing just that. He just needs a willing female to test it, because why jeopardize a dude, right?

So off goes the doc’s daughter (Noelia Noel, Carnival of Crime) to the tail end of the 19th century, when she encountered/encounters none other than Count Dracula (Aldo Monti, The Book of Stone). Actually, he introduces himself as Alcuard; it takes her peers a hot minute to realize that’s the backward spelling of Dracula, once a professor has the outta-nowhere idea to put crayon to paper and hold it up to a mirror.

Meanwhile, back at the lab in present day, Santo somehow watches all this unfold on a TV, as big nerd/beta male Perico (Alberto Rojas) earns his stripes as a comic-relief sidekick by swallowing a whistle.

To address the “sexo” portion of the title, El Vampiro y el Sexo is the spicy version of the mild Santo en el Tesoro de Drácula (aka Santo in the Treasure of Dracula). Repressed since its limited theatrical release, el Sexo contains several minutes of Playboy-style nudity. Dracula clearly has a type: Russ Meyer’s. His victims, whom he feels up before biting their necks (“My teeth have inoculated your flesh!”), are so top-heavy, they’re anachronistic.

So much of so many mamacitas is on parade that for a while, you may forget you’re watching a Santo movie. When the inevitable wrestling scenes arrive, viewers may be whiplashed back into reality. It’s not your fault. —Rod Lott

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Thanks to Something Weird Video, all but 25 minutes of the once-lost Six She’s and a He exists, under its original title of Love Goddesses of Blood Island. While the aimless film bears no connection to the Blood Island trilogy, it certainly revels in that gorgeous, gory spirit.

Bill Rogers (A Taste of Blood) plays Fred Rogers (!), a B-26 bomber pilot whose plane goes down around Okinawa. Passed out in a raft in the middle of the ocean, he’s pulled to shore by some lovely loinclothed ladies led by Aphrodite (Launa Hodges), who says, “You will get to know this stick intimately.” (Trust me: It’s a warning, not a come-on, because these half-dozen honeys are not in that kind of movie.)

Surrounded by live exotica tunes, tiki torches aplenty and a pig roasting on a mouth-to-anus spit, the all-female tribe of six sexpots live and love on a set that looks borrowed either from a school play adaptation of Fantasy Island or from a scrapped Price Is Right Showcase Showdown. While the women do have offscreen sex with Fred, they also deprive him of sleep, subject him to hard labor and harder bamboo swats, and flaunt their all-around superiority to the Aqua Velva man.

Just ask the Nazi (Joe Capriano) who gets his guts torn out by the gals during a torture ritual. On the movie’s meager resources, the German soldier’s intestines resemble wet balloon animals. In other words, Six She’s and a He — directed by Richard S. Flink (producer of William Grefé’s Sting of Death) and written by actor William Kerwin (God’s Bloody Acre) — is something of a wet dream as scripted by Herschell Gordon Lewis and/or a nightmare of the incel set. Neither is a bad thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Something Weird Video.