Devil Doll (1964), by Lindsey Shonteff

There may have been a few of you last week who read my review for The Devil-Doll and thought to yourselves--"Hmm, that doesn't sound like the movie I watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000." Wrong Devil Doll! This is, like a few other inhabitants of the A-List, one of the movies that Joel/Mike/Jonah and the Bots introduced me to. This indie British chiller is nothing special, but it has enough trashy weirdness that it makes for a pretty entertaining watch even outside the riffs of the Satellite of Love.

The Great Vorelli is a stage hypnotist who works with a ventriloquist dummy named Hugo. There are many early intimations that Vorelli's shows are more than a little upsetting. First, he hypnotizes a dude into mentally taking the place of a Chinese person who the man saw executed. The trauma isn't permanent--the man forgets everything once Vorelli snaps his fingers--but it's hard to imagine any audience that would want to watch something like this. Then, when Hugo comes out, he and Vorelli prove to have a mutually abusive relationship. Admittedly, the audience still applauds wildly in the wake of his "comedy" routine that's about as funny as a math test. What is truly impressive about Vorelli's act is that he can ventriloquize (sure, we'll call it that) through Hugo without even having to touch him. It's like the doll is really alive.

But our story doesn't truly begin until Vorelli has met Marianne Horne, a wealthy girl who he hypnotizes into an expert dancer. It's clear that Vorelli has some sort of perverse lust for her, and when we meet Vorelli's other assistant, a 30ish woman who only covers half her ass onstage, we start to understand what sort of man Vorelli really is. It's clear that his current assistant has been drained of all hope and life by Vorelli's cruelty, and Marianne is about to be put on the same path. Marianne is scared of Vorelli--she says that much to her reporter boyfriend, an American named Mark English (an American named English...was that someone's idea of a joke?). But he telepathically compels her to come visit him, so she can invite him to her aunt's charity ball. During this time he shows as a wine called "Blood of the Virgin," and he begins to hypnotize her he repeats that the wine is "deep...rich...red...warm..." Ughhh. Nothing happens yet, but after a once-again depressing excuse for a show at the charity ball, where Hugo actually threatens Vorelli with a knife, Vorelli drags Marianne further under his spell and rapes her. Hugo, whatever he is, has had enough. He goes to find Mark, and tells him to look up what he was doing in 1948 Berlin. Mark sends a reporter friend to Berlin to investigate. Meanwhile, Vorelli ends up in some rather confusing soup when Hugo kills his washed-up cheeky assistant, to frame him for murder. Not only is this point basically forgotten, but it paints Hugo, a sympathetic character, as a murderer. It contributes to a surreal noir-like griminess that haunts the movie even outside of Vorelli's shows.

It becomes clear that Hugo was not always a dummy--in the late '40s, in Germany, he was Vorelli's assistant, after the man spent a prolonged period of time studying both medicine and mystical techniques in soul-transference. Eventually, during a show, Vorelli killed Hugo in a way that trapped his soul in the dummy. Now Vorelli intends to do the same to Marianne, apparently so he can get her family's money. What?! I would assume he would want his "bride-to-be" to keep her human body for as long as possible, given what he's done to it so far--and what he has a habit of doing to his female assistants. For a movie with this much sexual grime oozing up from beneath, it's a little jarring for the film to claim that the primary interest of this villain is money.

But anyway, this is all leading up to one of the best fight scenes of all time, pitting man vs. dummy. I can't possibly describe how ludicrously awful this fight is, so I will encourage you only to seek the film out for yourselves. It's a sight to see.

Devil Doll is an ever-welcome combination of cheap sleaze and effective atmosphere. Vorelli's show at the beginning is murky, smoky, and sweaty--there is no music, save for the ominous thumping beat we the audience get to hear. It would be an astonishingly eerie experience to watch a man force another man to believe he's going to be shot in the head in silence, in the dark. This movie seems like the sort of thing that would be decently shocking in early-'60s Britain, if anyone actually saw it. Plus, Hugo is a scary motherfucker--when Vorelli calls him ugly, he unfortunately does have something of a point. I'm not saying that this is horror gold, but the mixture of the sleaze with the oily, claustrophobic atmosphere is interesting to watch. Especially when it all falls out and becomes funny again. Invite Tod Browning over and you'll have yourself a zany double feature.

Oh, and I'll quote it before you know it: "Ham! I love it."

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Performance (1970), by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

200 MOVIE REVIEWS!!! We're celebrating by taking a look at my favorite movie of all time, the hyper-trippy mindbender of a crime-occult adventure known as PERFORMANCE!

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Horror Express (1972), by Eugenio Martin

We're going to be doing two train movies over the next two weeks, and if you've been keeping up on things here on the A-List, you can guess what the second one is going to be. For now, we'll be covering Horror Express, a legendarily bizarre Spanish-British sci-fi movie starring Hammer greats Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Forever full of unexpected twists, Horror Express brings more than just star power to the table, and while it somehow manages to be boring at times, it's definitely not something horror fans will want to pass on.

In 1906, Dr. Saxton (Lee) is transporting some very precious cargo back to England from Tibet--the frozen mummy of a 2 million year old proto-human creature which may have ties to the yeti. He is irritated by the presence of an old colleague of his, Dr. Wells (Cushing), who is overly curious about the nature of his finding. Before boarding the Transiberian Express, he is additionally irritated by a priest, who tells him his cargo is of the Devil--a statement somewhat easy to believe, given the dead man with the turned-white pupils found mysteriously at the perimeter of the crate; similarly, the priest is unable to draw a cross on the crate with chalk. Saxton, being Christopher Lee, dismisses all of this as rubbish and poppycock and soon he, Wells, and the yeti are aboard the train. Wells eventually pays a porter (VICTOR ISRAEL!!!) to peer inside the crate, but little does he knows that doing so will awaken the yeti's demonic presence. It slowly transpires that the "yeti" was merely the host body for something ancient...and alien. Indeed, by gazing into the retinal images of the dead yeti (in invocation of optography, my favorite pseudoscience) they determine that whatever was wearing the yeti was an extraterrestrial presence left behind on Earth 2 million years prior. All that time, this creature has been waiting for a chance to escape--and it doesn't care who it has to possess or slaughter to leave Earth.

Though there are suggestions of the supernatural--or rather, the super-scientific, for one can assume the alien's powers of possession are merely an evolutionary quirk of its race rather than an employment of magic--from the get-go, I seriously went into this just expecting a yeti-on-a-train movie. That in itself would be pretty fascinating, especially with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Victor Israel, and (though I did not mention him in the synopsis) Telly Savalas in tow. Savalas plays a ruthless Russian cossack who boards the train to investigate the deaths, and mostly ends up manhandling the passengers until he learns too late about the alien. Without the alien, however, this movie probably wouldn't end up in A-List territory. For without the alien, we would not have the climax where Christopher Lee fights off an army of zombies, a feat which he probably never replicated.

I really cannot understate how much subverted expectations help this movie. Even in small ways. I bet you'd never see a movie made in Franco's Spain starring the leads of the infamously-conservative Hammer Horror franchises suggest that there are powers which God Himself can't save us from. The question of faith is a big one in this movie and it is never entirely answered--merely explored. I feel it sort of works better that way, raising chicken-or-egg questions on the nature of mythology. Does the alien resemble a demon because it actually comes from Hell, or is it that ancient humans were inspired to create tales of demonic beings because of encounters with the creature? I've always enjoyed stories like this, and that it tells such a story with a light touch is definitely a high point.

The alien also invokes another expected trope when it tries to convince its human enemies that if they let it live, it will use its superior knowledge to get rid of hunger and disease. It's a trick, of course, and we don't even know if that's something the alien can do. But even if it can't, it's a testament to the alien's psychology that it employs this trick. It has learned to be a demon--and demons tempt people. That's how they get you.

Again, the movie does manage to drag in places, but originality is a mighty queen. Horror Express constantly innovates and deconstructs its own ideas while never coming across as silly or ass-pull-y for such. Alien invasion movies set in the early 1900s are rare anyway, so it's totally worth it to check out this one.

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Book Club of Desolation #22: Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres (1971), by Paul Bera

Last year I took a look at the first of the French Frankenstein pulps. This year, I figured it would be nice to have the Book Club of Desolation return to similar waters--only this time, the book I read was untranslated. That's why I failed in my promise to have a monthly Book Club review up for January (on top of being sick as shit). It took me quite some time to read my way through Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres, the first of Paul Bera's six-volume series chronicling the eternal war between the avatars of cosmic forces known as Leonox and Lisa, but I found it a fulfilling experience, to say nothing of the wonders it did for restoring my knowledge of French. Even with the language barrier in place, Bera's prose reads smoothly and thrillingly, with enough pulp action and supernaturalism to make me seriously consider tracking down the rest of the series, before all the remaining rare copies are snatched up.

Our protagonist is Lacana, a ten-time serial killer constantly on the run from the police. While hiding out in Paris, he feels a compulsion to enter a building, which seemingly contains more on the inside than it does on the outside. This is the headquarters of the mysterious organization known as "Leonox and Co." headed by, as you may expect, a man named Leonox. But Leonox is less a man than he is a demon; he possesses supernatural powers, and is in fact the embittered slave of what may or may not be the cosmic embodiment of evil, known as "the Master" or "He Who Controls Leonox." In exchange for his service, Leonox offers Lacana a new identity, including a new face and set of fingerprints--he'll accomplish this by giving him a whole new body. The first of many catches in this deal is that in order to get this body, he has to share a coffin with it. The process is a success, however, and Lacana becomes instead Francis Dalvant, a famous journalist killed in Vietnam. As part of his operations, "Dalvant" next comes in contact with the mysterious Lisa, a young woman who claims to be able to see Lacana's soul in Dalvant's body. Lisa has frequent clashes with the police for her strange statements and behavior; they think she's a drug addict. Slowly, however, Lacana/Dalvant will learn that she is Leonox's spiritual opposite, a servant of a more benevolent cosmic force known as "He Who Controls Lisa." (It's worth noting that neither of these cosmic forces are truly good or evil, it's just that Lisa is beautiful and Leonox is monstrous, both in a variety of ways.) His encounters with Lisa "reunite" him with Dalvant's old friend, the Principal of Police Princex. In the end, Lisa and Princex reform Lacana, who ultimately takes on the mental traits of Dalvant, who was an intrinsically good man. He and Lisa go after Leonox and successfully kill him after he takes control of the body of Dr. Satelm, who has the power to unleash a world-destroying plague. Lisa takes the rap for the murder, claiming she was Satelm's jealous mistress, and goes to jail--but to Lacana/Dalvant's delight, she escapes, and he begins traveling the world in search of her.

It's amazing how well Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres fits the formula of English pulp stories, and how well it pulls it off too. It's something of a random events plot, yes--now Lacana is poisoned with curare! Now Leonox is trying to unleash a plague!--but it also taps into the vein of worldbuilding which is so vital to pulp storytelling. So many ideas whiz past us at once. Just pages after revealing that our narrator-protagonist is a serial murderer, we are dragged into a world of the magical and inexplicable with the cosmic distortions of Leonox's headquarters. From there we have body-swapping, celestial war, and living burials. Oftentimes, the descriptions of the spiritual aspects of Leonox and Lisa come across as Lovecraft-lite, or Lovecraft processed through fairy-tales--sparkling and glittering, but also vast, unknowable, and perhaps most properly, incomprehensible. All of this is presented in a style which is both simple and compelling.

I really should say how grateful I am for the simplicity of the style. A lot of key points are repeated again and again, which helped me get through the plot in the case of my translations failing the first time around. (I'm still embarrassingly vulnerable to false cognates.) However, this style is also probably the book's greatest weakness--as compelling as it is, the tendency to repeat does get a little silly at times. "It was incredible that I, Lacana, ten-time killer, could be standing here in the presence of the police!" is a phrase that comes up over time and time again. Yeah, I imagine most serial killers would be shocked at rubbing elbows with the cops after making their faces known, but we don't need to be told that so often. Lacana also has a tendency to forget that he is now Francis Dalvant for too much of the book, and he keeps chanting that he has new fingerprints over and over again. These parts can be glazed over once you get the rhythm of things, though.

I keep thinking about how cool it is to have the main character of the book be a serial killer who slowly redeems himself as pieces of another man merge with his persona. I'm pretty sure that Dalvant's spirit is actually coming back and that's what's causing Lacana to take on his traits--eventually their reference to themselves as two people seems to transcend metaphor. Lacana/Dalvant is thus of dual nature, good and evil--though Dalvant wasn't purely good, nor was Lacana purely evil. Setting up this dichotomy furthers the book's themes of good and evil by making our lead(s?) into parallel(s?) of Leonox and Lisa, albeit with human drives that the reader can understand. Bera seems to believe that Good and Evil are important concepts to mankind, but they also have gray areas and spots where they blend--how very '70s of him! It's notable too that Christianity doesn't enter the picture at all; neither of the forces behind Leonox and Lisa are aligned with God or Satan in any way.

I say this is a book that reflects the '70s, but it's also French in a way that reminds me of why I love French media. It makes sense to title the series after Leonox, and to have the protagonist be a reforming serial killer, when this is a story coming from the same country that created not only the Grand Guignol, but Fantomas, the ultimate villain-pulp protagonist and grandpappy to Diabolik, Killing, Kriminal, and all those other groovy, creepy masked thieves and killers who spread through Europe and the Middle East throughout the middle of the 20th Century. France loves its villains, and Leonox was no exception...even if he's largely forgotten today.

The chronicles of Lisa and Leonox are practically begging for English translations, and I would eagerly snap those up if/when they ever came along. Despite some minor flaws, this was an awesome read and I would love to see what happened next to these characters. Longue vie à Leonox!

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Voodoo Man (1944), by William Beaudine

There are three kinds of people who know about Bela Lugosi. The first will praise him as a film god--he was Dracula, and the original, at that, not taking in that Max Shreck fella. The second will decry him as a hack. The third, probably most populous of three, will simply ask you, "Who?" All of these are valid responses; no actor lasts forever, and he turned in a mixture of both shitty and wonderful performances. If you want to see him shine, check him out in The Devil Bat and Bride of the Monster; he is poorly represented by The Ape Man and, in my mind, Dracula. In my mind, his ability to turn in either a stunningly bad performance or a stunningly amazing one is compelling--it's through Lugosi that I've been on my '40s horror kick recently. I may be reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel, as '40s trash is some of the most painful of the bunch, but sometimes barrels are worth scraping. The search has exposed me to the odd impoverished wonders that are Bowery at Midnight, Black Dragons, and today's film, Voodoo Man.

Voodoo Man (along with Bowery and Black Dragons) was the result of a nine-film contract Lugosi signed with Monogram Pictures producer Sam Katzman. Monogram, along with Devil Bat producer PRC, were the literal Poverty Row of Hollywood, and each of the horror films they produced were rushed by any other company's standards, poorly edited in both production and scripting, and generally just cobbled together in the worst of ways. The Monogram Nine cemented Lugosi's status as a B- or C-actor, though he probably hit that when he made his first outing with Monogram with Mysterious Mr. Wong, which I have briefly discussed before. All the same, he manages to reel in a good performance in Voodoo Man, being one of many assets that this make a surprisingly good time.

As in the previous Monogram film, 1942's The Corpse Vanishes (featured on MST3K!), Lugosi plays a Dr. Orloff-esque scientist who has to restore life to a sickly female relative (his wife in this case). However, whereas The Corpse Vanishes saw Lugosi's Dr. Lorenz was doing the ol' harvest-their-glands trick that we also see in The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire, here Dr. Richard Marlowe has become the titular Voodoo Man. With the aid of his houngan George Zucco and brain-damaged henchman John Carradine, he strives to restore his dead wife from the grave. He kidnaps beautiful young women by means of roadblocks set up by crooked gas station workers under his employ, and also a machine that can short out car batteries at a range. He keeps the women in suspended animation until he needs them to transfer "mind to mind...soul to soul...life...to...DEATH!" Along the way, a sheriff pokes into things somewhat effectively, and the friends one of the victims eventually learns kindly Dr. Marlowe's terrible secret. And, of course, they stop him--an open-and-shut slice of life, in sixty minutes.

This is already a pretty solid pulp concept, and it's pure fun to see it put into action, but there are some interesting twists and turns along the way--almost all of which spawned through sheer brainlessness. Like some of the other Monogram flicks, this one used its poverty to subvert censorship standards at the time: there's the scene where one of the female leads get kidnapped by John Carradine when her car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That he licks his lips and says, "Yer pertty" is one thing; the later suggestion that he feels up the comatose ladies his Master keeps in the cellar is another. (Of course, there was implied necrophilia in The Corpse Vanishes, too.) Here, the grime of Poverty Row makes the subject matter even seedier--it's jarring if you're used to older horror films being "clean." But the cheapness detracts, too, or at least makes things absurd. Take for example the fact that John Carradine bangs on a drum as part of the voodoo ritual, but we can only hear the drum when the camera cuts over to him. Or the fact that the Sheriff, upon visiting kindly Dr. Marlowe, comments on how gloomy his house is. Except the house isn't gloomy, it's as well-lit as a movie set! (Presumably to accommodate a camera that would be unable to record in actual darkness.) Which gets taken even further by Lugosi's response: "We use very little light in the house, my eyes are not in the best of shape." There is some attempt to use creepy lighting in the film but it's given maybe 2% of the film's total devotion. You can feel the lamp next to you, set down on the floor where there was room and vaguely aimed at the actors. Fortunately, Lugosi and Carradine can sustain tension, mystery, and atmosphere where the rest of the cast cannot.

I should still define myself when I say that Lugosi's acting is "fine" here. There are four moods that Dr. Marlowe displays depending on the scene: the first is the angry, violent person who lashes out at his servants. Physical violence is not becoming to the former Count Dracula, which is probably why most of the scenes of Lugosi actually hitting people happen between cuts. The second is the contrasting public personality, where he is almost childlike in his politeness, to deflect suspicion--he also does this in Black Dragons and to a hilariously passive-aggressive extent in The Devil Bat. Then there is creepy Bela, where he speaks precisely and moves slowly--the sort of thing he got famous for, him at his best, when the morphine wasn't throwing off his focus. Finally there's sad Bela. You can already envision it if you've seen Bride of the Monster. He's this close to belting out "'Ome? I have no 'ome." It's very clear that Lugosi had a style, and it was a style much more complex than most people think, even if there were many patches where he was essentially playing Dracula all over again. I think it's fascinating that in many of his movies you can find this same pattern of four: the misplaced violence, the courteous passive-aggression, the spookiness, and the hammy grieving. He had his limitations, so he's hardly a god, but he's far from the plank of cardboard a lot of people peg him as.

Speaking of vampires (or the people who played them): this and Corpse Vanishes are essentially vampire films, though they present the interesting twist of being vampirism by proxy, and with gland-juice and souls instead of blood. I feel like the theme of this one is how horrifying it is for the old to burn the young to sustain their lives. It's safe to say that's where a lot of the horror of vampirism ultimately comes from--something ancient denying the turn of progress by constantly feeding on the agents of progress. If you want to be pretentious about it, it's the horror behind the Biblical Moloch: throw the babies into the burning idol, so that the devil-god doesn't kill the non-babies. Or it's like Cronus, devouring his children to sustain his power. What's dead is dead, and passed is passed; don't chain up a bunch of ladies in white nightgowns in your basement to steal life-force from. Because eventually, the monster of the past has to be staked through the heart, or castrated by the children. Or, hell, maybe it's all just supposed to be a don't-tamper-in-Baron-Samedi's-domain sorta thing. The writers may not have given it much thought, but any writers, cheap or otherwise, is going to channel the conventions and tropes of the culture they live in, and those tropes are worth examining.

And of course there has to be a twist at the end. The main character turns out to be a Hollywood screenwriter who presents his write-up of his adventure to his boss under the title Voodoo Man, to star Bela Lugosi. Ha, ha. Earlier there's a bit too where he and another character discuss the possibility of zombies, but he rules them out: "They're just a scene writer's nightmare!" It's weird, though, because Robert Charles, the screenwriter of Voodoo Man, only wrote this plus Return of the Ape Man from later that year. The name could have been a pseudonym, of course, but to me it's funny that he'd be complaining about zombie movies he never made. I mostly wish I knew which zombie movies in particular he meant, 'cause if he wrote this, I'd love to see what he could've done with the walking dead.

The Soultangler (1987), by Pat Bishow

"After life--after death--the madness begins!"

And what great madness it is. Long Island is a place I've never visited, but want to go to now more than ever. That may be odd for some people (including Long Islanders themselves), but I have always seen it as a faerie-tale world by way of infamous teenage director Nathan Schiff. Schiff, who will inevitably appear on this site at some point, created four films of bizarre and disgusting elegance, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh in 1979 and ending with Vermilion Eyes in 1991 (he did also make 1993's The Last Heterosexual and 2008's Abracadaver, but I haven't found the former and the latter lacks the magic). Schiff's films are surreal, intellectual, and vomit-inducing, and all of them have earned a special--or infamous--place in my heart. Long Island occupies that same place. Now, it seems to be a veritable nest of miracles, as today's film, The Soultangler, was also made in Long Island. It's safe that say that that particular part of New York is on its way to becoming the lunatic trash capital of the world.

Doctor Anton Lupesky has created Anphorium, a drug that allows people to transfer their souls into corpses and control them. The corpse must possess eyes for this to work, for after all, the eyes are the window to the soul. Despite his accomplishments, however, Lupesky is "evil...an agent of Sey-Tawn, if not the Devil himself," to quote his murdered lab assistant. Said assistant's daughter, Kim, tries to investigate the circumstances behind her father's death. Kim is an incredibly cool lady. When her boss at the paper doesn't listen to her, she hangs up his phone call to yell at him. She also smokes cigarettes, which the movie reminds us of many times. Slowly, we learn that Lupesky really is evil, as evidenced by the goofy faces he makes as he covers himself in skull-blood, and by the fact that believes by way of Descartes (?) that women have inferior souls. He explains the latter point when on a date with his boss. When Kim visits Lupesky he gives her Anphorium, causing her to hallucinate up some zombies. In the final showdown, almost nothing will be spared from a spattering of both gore and ludicrousness. There are zombies, including one who garrotes someone with his guts. All along the way we get a lot of talk about the soul that manages to avoid being all New Age-y and awful. I feel like it's a movie that tries to say something about the soul, but maybe doesn't.

Because of its metaphysical subject matter--or its attempts at such--Soultangler is an inherently surreal film. Shirtless men rub their hands over yellow walls. Closeups of eyes occur frequently. Stop motion abominations have tarantulas crawl on them. The stop motion in this movie, by the way, is amazing, and in fact all of the effects are. The film seems very professional: it has a full cast and crew, great cinematography, and experienced, if sometimes crazed, editing. There are still enough line flubs, acting failures, and awkward camera glances to make it clear that this was still a production made by one of us Little Guys, not a big studio. It is a mixed beast of the most entertaining sort, and it is a legitimately good movie that happens to be batshit weird. But it still all makes sense, even if you have to watch it a couple of times. But you should be doing that anyway!

I really can't allow myself to glance over the depth of the sheer oddity of this film. Much of the dialogue, especially Kim's father's narration, is incredibly over the top, to the point where it gives the movie an almost pulp-like quality. Actually, this would make an excellent villain pulp, with Doctor Lupesky, of course, as the villain. He has some creepy goons working for him, including a heroin addict who goes for the ever-creepy Texarkana Phantom Killer look from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (which, incidentally, was also used for Bruce from Nathan Schiff's Long Island Cannibal Massacre).

Then again, a pulp probably wouldn't have the trippy dream sequence where Kim is attacked by a zombie priest whose speech is slowed down and backwards. Even the Great Shit of Yore isn't perfect. And Soultangler isn't perfect either--there are some tonal transitions (usually in the form of oddly-placed comedy bits, including Three Stooges doorway schitck with Lupesky and the heroin addict), which may throw people off, even though they were great for me. And for me, at least, it probably is perfect.

It is a film that builds slowly, like a sports stadium built with too many taxpayer dollars. In the beginning, yeah, we do get Lupesky tripping the fuck out. But it has nothing on all of the chaos of the the finale, what with its plethora of cackling faceless corpses. It is never boring because there is always something else great on the horizon, whether it be the graveyard-monologue dubs or the out-of-control latex creatures that populate this fascinating landscape.

The world of this film is a place of madness. And the madness flows richly from New York.

Long Island or bust--I'll make it someday.

P.S. This movie has a pretty rocking soundtrack. Even if the end credits music is apparently just a recording of someone puking.


I'd like to give a special shoutout to Bleeding Skull and their amazing movie label, Bleeding Skull Video. Without Bleeding Skull Video I never would have seen Soultangler, and indeed, without Bleeding Skull's amazing reviews, I wouldn't have encountered the magnificent world of trash cinema.