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By Todd Garbarini

Directors Joe Dante (1984’s Gremlins) and Allan Arkush (1979’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) cut their teeth in Hollywood putting together trailers for Roger Corman films in the early 1970s and got the idea to make their own film by piecing together stock footage from other Corman pics and shooting a story around the clips. Armed with $55,000 from Mr. Corman, Hollywood Boulevard is the result. Released in 1976 on a smattering of screens, Hollywood Boulevard is a charming and entertaining send-up of Hollywood filmmaking which stars the incomparable (and sadly, the late) Candice Rialson as Candy Wednesday, a fresh-off-the-bus naïve blonde who, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, wants to be an actress and walks straight into the office of agent Walter Paisley (Dick Miller). His advice to just go out and walk the streets and be seen is taken quite literally, and she finds herself suckered...

As horror archetypes go, the “demonic possession” subgenre is one that didn’t really hit its stride until the 1973 release of the William Friedkin production of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel The Exorcist. Before that there were sporadic cinematic mentions of demons taking over the bodies of the living, but it was The Exorcist and the cultural phenomena it created that set the tone from then on.

After reports of people literally throwing up in theaters, passing out in their seats, and – most importantly – record box office numbers being tallied, the list of films that wanted a piece of the demonic action came fast and furious with titles such as Ovidio G. Assonitis and Robert Barrett’s Beyond The Door, aka The Devil Within Her (1974); the great Mario Bava’s La Casa Dell’Esorcismo, aka House of Exorcism, aka Lisa and the Devil (1974); and on through the years until...

The devil wants your mommy in Michael Frost‘s disturbing short horror movie Antivirgen 1: Chi Sei?, which reworks footage from two classic Italian Exorcist rip-offs from the 1970s and transforms them into exactly the kind of nightmare that you wished the originals actually were. Warning: This film is very Nsfw, unless of course you work for Fangoria or something.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Italian horror filmmakers where especially fond of taking original American horror movie concepts and beating them down into a bloody pulp. While Exorcist fever gripped all sorts of shlock directors, from blaxploitation trash like the late William Girdler‘s Abby to the crappy legitimate sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic, Italian maestros seemed to churn them out by the bucketful.

Chi Sei? was one of the more popular and notorious of the possession set, especially when it was released in the U.S. under the title Beyond the Door.