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Here are the entries that were added in July:

ANCIENT EVIL: SCREAM OF THE MUMMY
	(2000 - aka Bram Stoker's Legend of the Mummy 2) dir: David Decoteau; w/ Jeff Peterson, Trent Latta, Ariauna Albright, Russell Richardson. No skin; no gore. A nerd wakes up an Aztec mummy to get revenge on all the popular kids. So a portly mummy shambles randomly while what looks like a gang of rejects from a Grease audition wanders around reciting inane dialogue. This is a uniquely dull and dismal attempt at a movie; it fails on so many levels, one could fill a textbook with negative examples of film craft. What the movie really seems to be all about is people wandering around with flashlights; that accounts for 80% of the footage -- if that's your fetish, you'll be in heaven -- but for the rest of humanity, this is the cinematic equivalent of a kick in the crotch.

BUMMER
	(1973 - aka The Sadist) dir: William A. Castleman; w/ Kipp Whitman, Dennis Burkey, Connie Strickland, Carol Speed. Plenty o' skin; no gore. A two-bit rock band does some rock band stuff, the groupies take their clothes off a lot, and at the very end some people get to die. I would say the only point of this flick is to show naked girls, but I don't see how that can be when the movie makes every possible effort to bore people to death. They even resort to the artsy montage -- you can't convince me the producers weren't trying to kill people with this crap. A fair bit of nudity and some senseless (rather, nonsensical) violence lends it some exploitation value, but I've rarely seen a more deliberate effort to turn human brains into mud.

the CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT
	(1960 - Italy) writ & dir: Tanio Boccia; w/ Rik Battaglia, Irene Tunc, Paul Muller, Gianna Maria Canale. Okay, this time we're in a vaguely Arabic kingdom but with the same old plot -- nice peasant boy turns out to be the son of the sultan and must battle the "vile usurper". This thing did have some budget... but it also has a B-rank cast who clearly didn't get enough rehearsal time, the script is suffering seizures and is told through the most stilted and verbose English translation I've ever heard, and the action scenes are performed by people who had not the slightest idea of how to handle weapons or ride horses. All this does give it some MST3K potential; which is good, because without heckling, this butt-zit of a movie is practically unendurable.

Dr. JEKYLL'S DUNGEON OF DEATH
	(1982 -- aka The Dungeon; The Jekyll Experiment) prod & dir: James Wood; w/ James Mathers, John Kearney, Dawn Carver Kelly. No skin; no gore; no IQ. A thoroughly demented descendant is experimenting with the old formula on captives, who karate chop each other to death (gee whiz -- it's a Jekyll Fu flick); meanwhile, he's forcing help from brain-damaged enemies and relatives and keeping an old teacher's daughter as his doped-up sex toy. Okay, it scores well in the Wucking Feird department, but it barely qualifies as a movie. It's built on a crude script (assuming there actually was one), and filmed with minimal lighting and less budget. Still, it stays entertaining throughout; partly because of the deformed filmmaking, but mostly because of Mathers' increasingly hammy hysterics as a Jekyll who is rapidly going further past sanity than any Hyde ever ventured.

DRUMS OF JEOPARDY
	(1931) dir: George B. Seitz; w/ Warner Oland, June Collyer, Lloyd Hughes. Sending a piece of cursed jewelry as his harbinger of murder, a crazed Bolshevik (who only moonlights as a mad scientist) hunts down the last members of the Russian noble family he blames for his daughter's death. The plot points are more than a little contrived, but the story moves along well, the cast is good, and it makes a right fun thriller. Today, however, it is mostly remembered because Oland's mad murderer character is named "Boris Karlov". But since William Pratt adopted his stage name much earlier, and Frankenstein was released months later that same year; this seems to be just a cute coincidence. Regardless, it's a worthy little potboiler.

JOHNNY FIRECLOUD
	(1975 - aka Revenge of Johnny Firecloud) dir: William A. Castleman; w/ Victor Mohica, Ralph Meeker, David Canary. Tidbit o' skin; a hint o' gore. When the asshole land baron pushes the Vietnam vet (who's the wrong color and too close to his daughter) too far... it's the raging redskin versus the racist rednecks. A purely typical revenge formula that seems designed as a filler for the drive-in all-nighter. While it is capably filmed and played, it's also catatonically dull; the characters are flat, the dialogue is numbing, and even the violent scenes are somehow sleepy. The ending is a non-event that is an obvious attempt to lead into sequels for this Billy Jack wannabe -- mercifully, none have materialized.

LADY SNOWBLOOD
	(1973 - Japan) dir: Fujita Toshiya; w/ Kaji Meiko, Kurosawa Toshio, Daimon Masaaki. No skin; lotsa blood. In Meiji Japan, a young lady is conceived, born, and trained from birth to exact merciless revenge for the death of her family. It's an oddly lyrical tale of vengeance and violence... and its influence on Tarantino's Kill Bill is obvious. There is not a tremendous amount of action in the flick, but what's here is painted in blood -- and weaving it together is an effective drama of lost souls and cast-off regrets. It certainly does everything you would expect from a manga-based exploitation film, but then does the unexpected by actually being a damn good movie.

MANTICORE
	(2005 - for TV) dir: Tripp Reed; w/ Robert Beltran, Heather Donahue, Chase Masterson, Jeff Fahey. No skin; a bit o' gore. Now those wacky Iraqi terrorists are conjuring up ancient monsters! An isolated squad of actors who don't resemble GI's in the least must battle the beastie. The CG effects are less than adequate, the soldiers seem to come from an even further distant fantasy world than the monster, and the script gives every indication of having been written by someone who only recently learned to tie their own shoes. The camera-work is actually quite decent here, but anything would look bad when perched atop a script this alarmingly idiotic. If you truly enjoy laughing at clueless attempts to portray military action & personnel, this is your baby -- everyone else is warned away.