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Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

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The People’s Joker Blu-ray from Altered Innocence

After sparking controversy on the festival circuit, The People’s Joker found a home with Altered Innocence. The coming-of-age trans superhero parody will hit Blu-ray on August 13.

Vera Drew makes her feature directorial debut from a script she co-wrote with Bri LeRose. Drew also stars with Kane Distler, Nathan Faustyn, Lynn Downey, and David Liebe Hart. Tim Heidecker, Bob Odenkirk, Maria Bamford, and Scott Aukerman make cameos.

Joe Lipsett’s review raves, “The People’s Joker is an unabashed love letter to Batman properties, to camp, stand-up comedians, and – most importantly – the trans community. It is daring and ambitious and unapologetic.”

Special features include: commentary by Drew; commentary by...

When Bruce Lee died under mysterious circumstances in 1973 at age 32, the actor and martial artist left a hole in the action star firmament that seemed irreplaceable. That did not stop the Hong Kong film industry — and the rest of the world, for that matter — from trying anyway.

As Lee’s final (complete) film “Enter the Dragon,” released just six days after his death, became a worldwide box office phenomenon, “Bruceploitation” was born, enlisting look-alike performers to replace and imitate the trailblazing martial artist on screen. Decades after these copycat films deceived viewers — while still delivering some genuinely thrilling fight sequences — Severin Films is releasing “The Game of Clones: Bruceploitation Collection Vol. 1,” a compilation of 14 titles starring Bruce “impostors” like Ho Chung Tao, who went by the name Bruce Li, Ryong Keo (Dragon Lee), Chang Yi-tao (Bruce Lai) and Wong Kin-lung, who to this day goes by the name Bruce Le.

Juan Piquer Simón’s exploitation slasher Pieces (1982) has a bonkers reputation that precedes it, delivering one of horror’s most entertaining audience experiences of all time. The tagline, “It’s exactly what you think it is!” only scratches the surface of the weirdness within. Sure, you get exactly what you expect in terms of gore in this tale of a jigsaw puzzle-obsessed killer with a chainsaw, but the execution is so over the top there’s nothing that really prepares you for the unique brand of madness.

Simon was initially approached to helm a sequel to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, but passed because the script he was offered seemed too boring. Then he was offered a 30-page treatment for Pieces, then titled Jigsaw, intended at the time to be a made-for-tv movie. It was so insane that not only was he intrigued, he was determined to make the script believable.

Those scurrilous Italian ‘mondo’ films are difficult to see in original versions; this Something Weird double bill yields an American hybrid of one of the better (?) examples, given the classy touch of a narration by George Sanders. A second oversexed pseudo-docu is a homegrown mongrel with all the credibility of today’s Reality TV — it doesn’t even try to be legit. Once again, Severin comes through with a doubly guilty pleasure, for sex-starved carnival suckers everywhere.

Ecco + The Forbidden

Blu-ray

Severin Films/Something Weird

1962/65 + 1966

Street Date January 29, 2019

29.98

Severin Films has released two Something Weird ‘Mondo’ double bills on Blu-ray, that came out on DVD thirteen years ago on the Image label. One of the few genres of exploitation film that still receives little or no serious criticism is an infestation series of opportunistic faux- documentaries borne from the massive success of 1962’s Mondo Cane. These pictures do have a...