Notes for your listening pleasure...

Turn down the bass around 37 minutes and back up around 40. I couldn't get rid of the fuzz without losing the ridiculous sense of space.

There are clipping errors and glitches all over the place, it's better that way.

It's mostly samples fed through cheap FX until everything floats about. Feel free to fall asleep halfway through. Some parts are designed to be trippy and

...

Frisbee Peril




Escalator Danger




Kites Are Fun




Fridge Evil




Think Bike!




And Remember...

Right thinking film fans and home video collectors will doubtless by excited by the upcoming Blu-Ray edition of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, one of the most beloved films ever to destroy a career and cause a moral panic.

Moral Panics of the kind that engulfed Powell and his...

PROLOGUE

I'm sure many Cult Labs members were first hipped to the world of Eurotrash Horror, sleazy US slashers and other underground movie weirdness when the Thatcher government of the 1980s decided that, in the absence of a better bogeyman to blame societies...

This Sunday in Buffalo Bar, Cardiff, Designer Violence are putting a trailer screenings session in the garden (heaters on please!).

For those in the four corners of the UK who can't make it, here's what we'll be showing on the night...

When the Hollywood mainstream can turn the multiplexes into a mire of torture porn and Saw-style sadism and you can go and sit with an audience and see...

By The Grinning Cat

by The Grinning Cat

As everyone's favourite evil holiday approaches, here's a new clip from Cardiff based Video-Rock Superstars VHS DEATH to get you in the mood....

Mudfish McCollins - Good ol' boy, interstate arm wrestling champion, roadhouse Casanova - is a trucker with a difference. He's got 1200 lbs of North American Grizzly sitting in his cab. Meet 'Hoss ("Barnard" - Grizzly Makes a Bet / Grizzly Makes a Deal / Grizzly Saves Christmas)...

With so many Cult Labs Alternative Universe films out there in the wacky world of Made up movies, I've decided to share them with you in the form of mini capsule reviews

1980 Lost Voyage of the Disco Pirates

Director: Hodge Rental

When Chad, Frisky and Danny the Sleaze fall through a warp on the dancefloor of Studio 54, they find themselves...

Doug Grifton's 1983 B-Movie is a minor classic of the Robot Snake Genre (who can forget classics like Rattletron 3000 and Bionic Boa Riders) which did good business on VHS, thanks to it's outrageous body count...

1972's A Smack Down on Dope Street represented a new low in the seamy world of the Grindhouse quickie as Hal Manciano stepped surefootedly over the line of acceptable taste,...

The wild fire success of Italian Proto-Shockumentary Mondo Cane inspired Hal Manciano is pitch in with own collection of old news reel footage, faked scenes and erotic travelogue in 1964. Pitched at thrillseekers...

Year: 1959

AKA: The Bongo Murders / Beatnik Blast-Off

Tagline: "Squares, Straights and Cops need not apply!"

Hal Manciano had the accendent Beatnik culture firmily in his sights when he churned out Jazz-Poetry, Black Coffee and Murder quickie 'Hey Daddy-O! Don't Jive Me". A grimy story of Reefer, Scat Jazz, Rollnecks and Rumbles, the film proved a big draw in small town Drive-ins, where the flipped out, crazy sounds of the Bongo and the existential Beat-Poetry...

At the height of Porno-Chic, when uptown couples got down with the Grindhouse crowd and watching full strength Hardcore sex in a public cinema became briefly fashionable, Hal Manciano produced what some critics call his...

Hal leapt athletically onto the Post-Apocalyptic band wagon in the early 80s with his poverty stricken riff on The Warriors, Escape From New York and The Red Hand Gang, Nuclear Teens Get Wasted. It's a cheap, tatty Motel of a movie,...

Hal Manciano, as I noted in a previous review, had little time for the Counterculture, seeing the rebellious kids holding peace placards as traitors to the good old Red, White and Blue. That didn't stop him from becoming one of the leading producers...

Hal Manciano struck Grindhouse gold in 1974 with his low budget riff on James Bond movies, The Cult of the Sex Tigers. Filmed on the cheap and on the fly...

Year: 1967

AKA: Sizzle on Go-Go Street / Freak Out on Go-Go Street / Terror of the Acid Ghouls / Long Hair Shakedown

Tagline: "Even the Cops Let Their Freak Flags Fly!"

Hal strikes again, cashing in cluelessly on the prevailing youth trends and in the process producing one of the most demented of the late 60s Acid-Sploitation flicks. This is a movie that packs enough oil light effects, psychedelic trip sequences and happening beat combos into it's 80...

Hal 'Fats' Manciano was always a hack. Unlike Russ Meyer, who made Cheescake movies that fueled his own obsessions and turned a profit, Hal was only interested in the bottom...

Hal Manciano jumped on the Teen Beat bandwagon in 1957 with his spirited youth exploitation picture Motor-Teens Go Bananas (AKA Good Girls Go Ape / Burnt Rubber Hoedown).

A wry mixture of poverty row Juvie...

Just doing some research into obscure genre film makers and I turned up 'Fats' Manciano.




Above: Hal captured at the Santa Barbara Cult Cinema Expo Circa 1993


In a career that spanned almost 50 years of B movie production, Manciano produced pictures that act almost as a time line of American exploitation, as he directed and produced pictures that cashed in on teen...

THAT'S COOL!
THAT'S TRASH!
FOUR

...

NOW IN GHOULISH STEREO!

TURN OF YOUR MIND. RELAX AND FLOAT DOWNSTREAM...

...

NOW IN...

Track List


POT PARTY - Burt Topper

Anti-LSD propaganda from the soundtrack to late 60s Youth-Gone-Wild documentary "Teenage Rebellion"

...

REAL LIFE HORROR!





Chick comics are a revelation, but not in the way the authors of these fascinating but morally dubious comic book tracts would probably envisage.

Founded by fundamentalist Protestant Jack T. Chick, Chick Publications specialise in a...

The Mass Hypnosis Tape

This mix was the one I produced just before I made the "Erotic Sounds" tape, that featured only original material (well, when I say original, I mean tracks consisting of chopped up samples).

There's lots of my stuff on here as well as full tracks by other artists so this one might be described as transitional...

While you...

CLIPS FROM THIRST

...

Grindhouse Disco

Essentially more of the usual off center samples, this time over a more...

Last night I screened the Argento cut of Dawn of the Dead to a rapturous and occasionally confused audience of Halloween freaks in the achingly hip Buffalo Bar, Cardiff.

Rapturous because it's Dawn of the Dead, it's Halloween and nothing gets a crowd in the mood for all night dancing like gut munching Zombies in an abandoned shopping centre.

Confusion because most of the people were familiar with the film and the alternate...

From Within Trailer







Rumer Willis and Thomas Dekker star in the "INTENSE, DARK AND SCARY AS HELL" (Gorezone magazine) horror hit of the summer. This darkly disturbing tale is guaranteed to put the frighteners on fans of recent horror blockbusters such as the Final Destination trilogy, One Missed Call and The Grudge and The Ring series of movies. FROM WITHIN (cert. 15) will be released on DVD (£15.99) by E1 Entertainment on 24th August...

Keep up with Sexy Killer by adding the Facebook Fan Page:




FB.init("0087446f98bbf1d68bf94b428140d17b");Sexy Killer on Facebook

Just noticed this new feature on Facebook, which allows people to post a fan page widget to their site.

Here's the Masters of Giallo page...

FB.init("15d589ef3630088fc4982daba9644a69");Arrow Video's Masters of Giallo on Facebook

Bande érotique de mélange







After downloading a stack of smutty radio spots, I figured the natural home of all this hilarious filth was a porntastic mix tape. Be warned... This isn't a child friendly mix tape and if naughty words like "love hole" or "cock" offend you, please be on your way.

If, on the other hand, you want to hear 35 minutes of psychedelic lounge music, Wah Wah Porno-funk and sassy women talkin' trash....

All Time Top 100








Cardiff has an exciting night where local people involved in "the creative arts", get to play their top 100 records to a room full of hipsters.

I'm playing in July, so the groovers of Cardiff can expect 60s Psych, 70s funk, New York Disco, Punk rock and Don't Stop Believin' by Journey.

As usual, I can't leave well alone and I've made a mix cd. My and my partner will make 50 hand...

From the Annals of DVDisgo (RIP) and DVDresurrections


Possession








Another film caught up in the UK's draconian Video Nasty clampdown of the early ‘80s, Possession is in fact more of an extreme art house movie than the exploitative hard gore horror films it was lumped in with on the Department of Public Prosecutions banned list.

First of all, a word of caution - viewers expecting bloody thrills...

From the annals of DVDisgo and DVDresurrections


Men Behind The Sun









The ultimate geek show movie or a harsh indictment of Japan's war crimes during the second world war? Maybe it's both but be assured, Men Behind The Sun is one of the harshest, most uncompromising films ever committed to celluloid and then inflicted on an audience.

The film open with some young male adolescents who...

From the annals of DVDisgo (RIP) and DVDresurrections


La Settima Donna









This nasty slice of Italian exploitation will please fans of rough fare like Last House on the Left and They Call Her One Eye. In fact the movie was marketed in some territories as Last House on the Beach, which should give clued in viewers an idea of the queasy unpleasantness that’s packed into this stylish but depraved little...

From the annals of DVDisgo and DVDresurrections



Murder Rock







You've got to hand it to those crazy Italian exploitation directors, they knew how to churn out a watchable rip off of mainstream cinema's hit movies in double quick time. Conan The Barbarian inspired numerous spaghetti-fantasy movies like Fulci's Conquest and D'amato's Ator series. Dirty Harry kicked off a spate of right wing fantasies in which...

From the pages of the sadly defunct DVDisgo and the happily active DVDresurrections



La Cabina







This amazing short film was directed by Antonio Mercero for Spanish television in 1972. It's a wonderful example of efficient, lean horror story telling which squeezes in plenty of thrills and shocks in its 40 minute running time.

Essentially a European riff on a Twilight Zone style format, the film...

Another repost from... DVDisgo (RIP) and DVDresurrections



Conquest







First of all a quick warning. I am about to give a semi-decent review of a really bad film. Fulci's Conquest doesn't even register on the quality film radar in comparison to his masterworks like The Beyond or Don't Torture A Duckling. It's A-Grade, No Nonsense Trash-ola of the murkiest, most slapdash variety. So, for anyone reading this...

I'm using this blog to get all the writing I've done that's still floating around online in one place.

To this end, I'll be reposting reviews that were published first on my Myspace blog DVDisgo and also on DVDresurrections, a great Australian cult films website. Please pay them a call.


The Star Wars Holiday Special








Chewbacca is racing across space to spend the holidays with his family in...

The Uncanny





The lowly house cat; cherished pet, cute furry fluff ball, loyal companion...

Or are they part of some vicious and malignant plot to destroy humanity as they gather in hairy packs under streetlights, looking for trouble. The rather naff kids film, Cats and Dogs, put forward the proposition of a global feline conspiracy in which Machiavellian moggies plotted man and canine downfall but a small British horror anthology picture...

The Red Shoes





Not to be confused with Powell & Pressburger classic of the same name, The Red Shows is an excellent work of high drama horror, The Red Shoes continues Korea's run of quirky hits with a movie that piles on the gory shocks, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, while still focusing on character, in particular a riveting mother -daughter relationship at the heart of the movie that explodes into raw physical and verbal violence as the film moves...

Silver





Takashi Miike is capable of producing some extremely flawed cinema alongside his works of cultish genius like Audition or Full Metal Yakuza. But, even though Silver is among his least effective movies, in Miike world even the lesser work is still mildly entertaining. Drenched in bloodshed and perversity, Miike Amoral visions may have got a little fuzzy with Silver but as a comic book orgy of smutty sexual weirdness and sickening violence it's...

Duel Project




A unique Japanese film experiment, The Duel Project features two movies, both made under strict rules given by the two films producer. The films were to be shot in a single location, feature no more than three actors, one of whose character had to die. The budgets had to be small and a maximum eight days of shooting was allowed.

I've always been intrigued by filmmakers imposing strict criteria on their work; Lars Von Trier's work...

Nosferatu





Werner Herzog's late 70s sound and colour remake of the classic silent horror Nosferatu.

Starring well known thespian lunatic Klaus Kinski as the hideous vampire and lord of the rats, this is an arty take on vampiric lore that might at first alienate straight ahead horror fans but stick with it...it's a moody atmospheric piece with some vivid imagery. One scene that springs to mind is of a formerly well to do family trying...

The Xtro Franchise





Sold as an adult version of ET on it's release in 1983, the first of the series is a British made cheapy about a family man who is returned to Earth by his alien abductors after three years. The unfortunate man is now in possession of ungodly powers...

Appearing briefly on the Nasties list back in the 80s, Xtro has a few shocking scenes such as a pregnant woman who dies giving birth to an adult male, a trick Takashi...

Freezer (Freeze Me)


A particularly sleazy entry in the Asian canon of extreme cinema.

A woman moves away from her small town roots to the big city to escape the memories of a vicious gang rape assault. She builds herself a new life with a good career and a loving boyfriend but the recurring nightmares of that terrible event continue to haunt her.

Years later the members of mob that attacked her come calling but this time she doesn't take things...

Boy Meets Girl





Mid 90s low budget horror that caused serious controversy and even suffered bans on it's initial release.

In a seedy bar, Girl is looking for a victim and Boy wants to get laid. Soon they are back at Girl's flat where she gives him wine and they watch porn. The wine is drugged and soon Boy is feeling...a...little...woozy....

Boy wakes up. He can't move. The room is dark. Boy is strapped to a dentist's chair....

Fright Night





After the early 80s slasher cycle in which mysogynistic murder scenes and extremes of gore were the name of the game, the latter part of the decade saw comedy-horror ruling the video store roost with even Freddy Kruger lapsing into corny one-liners. The fact that Kruger became almost cuddly as the numerous sequels took their toll on his sinister reputation always annoyed me. Did no one ever ask whether producing cuddly toy versions of a...

Medusa Touch





A forgotten classic starring Richard Burton at the height of his late 70s hamming, it combines the horror and disaster genres to great effect and then hits the viewer with a killer downbeat ending, as was the fashion for horror flicks at the time.

Burton plays Morlar, a man who is recovering in hospital after being battered round the head in his home. The police are investigating the assault and also how he may be implicated...

Witchfinder General





Michael Reeves only directed three films before his tragic death from an overdose of downers in the late 60s. Luckily he left us with some fantastic films including a great late Boris Karloff vehicle, the Sorcerers, but of the three, Witchfinder General is his masterpiece, a slice of harrowing 17th horror that's a million miles away from the campy fun of it's Hammer contemporaries.

Vincent Price dropped the melodramatic...

Scum





The daddy of British youth crime movies and based on an instantly banned BBC production, Scum is a brutal portrayal of the harsh conditions in a Borstal, an archaic youth offenders unit that sort to brutalize prisoners into conforming to societies rules but instead turned out a generation of hard case psychos who'd had the humanity beaten out of them. Rife with racism, male rape and violence, Scum is not an easy watch, even by today's more liberal...

Black Mama White Mama





Queen of 70s black cinema, Pam Grier (Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, Jackie Brown) stars in this "Chicks-in-chains" rehash of the Classic Tony Curtis/Sidney Poitier prison escape film, "The Defiant Ones".

Two women prisoners, one black, one white, exist in a hellish prison where bullish lesbian guards hound them. During transportation an uprising from their fellow inmates allows our pair to escape into the jungle, joined...

House of Fear





In Drearcliff Manor a society of aging men live in a weird commune called The Good Companions, where each is heavily insured and the other members are the beneficiaries. The foreboding housekeeper hands each an envelope containing an ever-shrinking amount of orange pips before they are murdered in grisly fashion. The corpses are found mutilated, living up to a look legend that no one leaves Drearcliff in one piece...

Holmes...

Dementia (Daughter of Horror)





A real oddity, Dementia (also known by it's alternate title, Daughter Of Horror), started life as a 10 minute short before Director John Parker expanded this essentially silent movie into a 60-minute feature.

The movies only real dialogue comes from a narrator, a trick used in a lot of sleazy sex pictures in the 60s such as the Olga series of S&M movies. He welcomes us in the horrific depths of a fractured...

If





Malcolm McDowell (Clockwork Orange) takes on the establishment in this allegorical tale about the horror's of the British Public school system. Made in 1968, when popular culture seemed to be questioning everything, If... mirrored the global explosion of youth rebellion and it presents an educational system for the sons of the well off that seems designed to brutalize and beat the will out of young boys.

Directed by Lindsay Anderson...

Rosemary's Baby





"This isn't a dream... This is really happening!"


Mia Farrow stars with John Cassavetes in Roman Polanski's timeless chiller about Guy, a jobbing actor, and his elfin wife, moving into an old fashioned apartment building in New York City*. The filmmakers used the Dakota Building, which became infamous later on as the place outside which John Lennon was shot. The loving couple soon become friendly with the apparently...

Terror





A very young Jack Nicholson stars in this Roger Corman cheapy in which a young soldier in the Napoleonic wars chases a mystery women into an old, and of course creepy, castle occupied by a frail Baron, played by Boris Karloff.

The Baron is a deeply troubled man as a twisted old witch is trying to drive him to suicide and the strange girl that Nicholson followed is in on the plot...With Nicholson trapped in the eerie castle, all...

Odean issued some the Something Weird DVD a while back and, although the discs weren't as special as the extra packed R1 editions, it was still great to see these bottom shelf oddities in UK stores. Republishing this review gives me an excuse to post up some really odd trailers...



She Freak / Taste of Blood







A candy coloured 60s remake of Todd Browning's Freaks, She Freak is cheap drive in movie dreck that...

Hi folks,

Here's a link to a piece of music I made yesterday. Crackly old gospel record chopped up over a nice break with reverb and echo effects...

http://www.divshare.com/download/7253901-ffd

The Yellow Teddybears

The early 60s saw censorship slowly slipping and UK producers cashing in with a series of controversial (by the standards of the day) movies that pushed the sexual content envelope to it's limit.

Tony Tenser, later of UK horror specialists Tigon Pictures, was behind this 1963 movie which was packaged as an exploitative and pervy look at burgeoning sexuality among teenage school girls but was in fact a message movie about the perils of pre-marital...

Wild Style





Before the Hollywood exploitation of the New York Hip Hop scene saw the entertaining but totally camp and clueless Breakdance movies rake in the dollars, the originators of the worlds most popular music collaborated on a scrappy, badly acted but riveting look at New York street life, which brought together the four elements of the culture, B-Boying, Graffiti writing, rapping and DJing, into a strange hybrid of drama and documentary.
...

The Honeymoon Killers





A raw low budget classic from 1970, the Honeymoon Killers is based on real events in which a couple united by their outsider status go on a murderous rampage. When When Raymond and Martha meet through a lonely-hearts club they seem like a match made in heaven; she obese, obsessive and needy and he weak, slimy and deceitful. Together they hit on a vile scheme where he poses as a lonely guy who takes women from the dating club out...

Thirst





Deep Red and Blow Up actor David Hemmings stars in this amusing late 70s Australian vampire offering that predates the Blade movies in it's portrayal of blood drinkers as a well organized society, building human farms for harvest.

Returning readers may have read about my love of Near Dark, which portrays vampires as trailer trash predators in contrast to the high born sophisticates of most vampiric cinema. Normally, I'd side with...

Aenigma





"All her enemies will be eliminated... but first they will suffer!"


When a girl is rendered comatose following a cruel prank played by her school friends, she takes revenge from her hospital bed by possessing a new pupil at the exclusive boarding school she once attended. Soon the haunted newbie is setting about extracting a horrible revenge for the cruelty meted out to her possessor...

Director Lucio Fulci...

Massacre At Central High





Massacre At Central High is at first glace a typical slice of mid 70s exploitation, mixing as it does all the lurid violence and leering nudity that was required by Drive-in promoters and Grindhouse owners to keep their audiences sated. But beneath the usual trappings is a much odder movie that seems to have influenced later films such as Heathers in it's look at the corrupt malignancy that can lurk beneath the exterior of an...

Rocketship XM





The Future Is Coming!


A cheap B&W movie rushed into to production to beat the groundbreaking "Destination Moon" to the cinema screens in the early 50s, Rocketship XM sees a group of plucky astronauts veer off their chosen route to the moon, landing instead on mars in a mind numbing piece of unscientific anti-logic that sets up the rest of this odd slice of B-movie madness.

On arrival the crew discover...

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari





Enjoy the movie!


An asylum inmate reveals the story of Dr. Caligari, who has a sleeping walking slave called Cesare who is murdering the townsfolk of Holstenwell. Is the tale a product of one mans twisted imagination or the grisly truth...

A vital entry both in the history of horror cinema and film as a whole. Made in Germany in the 1920s, the film is a surreal masterpiece. Cabinet... is...

Get Christie Love






Get Christie Love is a TV movie spin off from the blaxploitation movies of the early 70s that featured ballsy afro queens who didn't take any crap and meted out justice with a Kung Fu kick and a mean one liner. Think movies like Coffy, Cleopatra Jones or Foxy Brown. The film was successful enough to spawn it's own shortlived TV series.

Following the usual path of female lead black movies of the time, Christie...

I Bury The Living





Robert Kraft is starting a new job as the chairman of a committee overseeing the running of a massive cemetery, a graveyard so huge that a map is kept in the office, displaying every grave. Pins are used, black for filled graves and white for sold plots that have yet to be occupied by the deceased.

When Robert makes an error and places a pair of black pins on the wrong grave site causing the young couple who paid for...

Attack of the Giant Leeches





From The Murky Underground Caverns...


When a drunken trapper reports that giant monsters are lurking in the local swamp, the townsfolk don't believe his inebriated ramblings until people start disappearing...

Welcome to 50s monster movie heaven in this basically awful but entertaining piece of tinpot cheapness.

The trapper turns up later, extremely dead and sporting great...

Teenagers From Out Space





Ultra low budget 50s drive-in nonsense for fans of kitzch camp and Sci Fi aficionados. It's Martian invasion time as the pesky aliens invade Earth in order to use our planet as a breeding ground for their food creatures (or men in rubber suits...you decide!) The Gargons!!!

One Martian becomes attached to an Earth woman, Betty (Are all women in 50s America called Betty?) and must now fight his own race to save...

Reefer Madness! (Tell Your Children)




Enjoy the whole movie!


A moralising cult classic from the 30s, designed to exploit fears of drug abuse while masquerading as a educational film in order to get shots of ladies showing their stocking tops past the stringent censors, Reefer Madness is a delirious riot of a movie in which we learn that smoking weed can lead to an interest in "Race" music (i.e. Jazz) played by wild haired dope lunatics...

Black Fist





"The Big Bad Black Dude of the Streets... He'll bust you up, slam you down and blast you into pieces!"


With a tag line like that how could I resist! I love blaxploitation movies. It's the music, the fashion, the hair and the ghetto kung fu action. I got sucked in by seeing Shaft at a young age but it's the less well known, cheaper and generally more exploititive ones that hold my interest now. Their more violent and...

Dementia 13





Roger Corman gave a leg up to a great many of Hollywood's biggest directors including ex Happy Days star Ron Howard and Francis Ford Coppola who made his directorial debut in Ireland on Corman's production, Dementia 13.

The Haloran family are gathering to carry out a morbid ritual to remember the demise of a drowned relative. The family bicker and plot while an axe murderer begins to stalk the grounds. Soon the family members...

Carnival of Soul





This was a one off movie by a company who specialized in industrial and educational films for businesses and schools. The producers obviously didn't realize they were making a classic that would go on to influence many genre filmmakers, including Romero who was clearly influenced in his choice of zombie make-up for "Night of the Living Dead"

A teenage drag race goes horribly wrong causing a car to plummet from a bridge...

Satan's Sadists





A perverse thrill can sometimes be gotten from wallowing in the last gasps of a once successful actors career. Think of Molly Ringwald, once a part of Pretty in Pink and heading for glory before crashing in the 90s and ending up in the terrible Aussie slasher movie "Cut".

And so to Russ Tamblyn, once riding high on the success of West Side Story, before Hollywood's excesses saw him plummet to earth, leaving him starring...

The Phantom of the Paradise





Carrie director Brian De Palma turns in a truly bizarre 70s oddity from the decade when studios were green lighting all sort of wacky projects.

A recording mogul, the diminutive Swan, makes a deadly enemy when he steals some music from Leach, an aspiring songwriter, to use at the launch of his new rock venue/palace of dreams, The Paradise.

Leach is a sensitive singer-songwriter type in the typical...

Sex & Zen





Classic Hong Kong Cat III eroticism that still manages to befuddle the sensibilities years after it was first released. Mixing softcore sex scenes with costume drama, this example of libertine film making is a great example of a genre that flourished in the Far East for a while until the Chinese government cracked down on it's more explicit facets.

Sex & Zen is the everyday story of a newly married man who goes on a journey...

The Nun & The Devil






Following the huge success of Ken Russell churching baiting classic The Devils, the Italian B-movie industry kicked into gear with a slew of "Nunsploitation" cash-ins designed to rack up the sacrilege, sex and bloodshed to get punters into theatres. The Nun and The Devil is one of the better examples of the style and is a good movie despite being in extremely dubious taste. Taking place in a 16th century holy order, it shows...

Rollerball





High-end 70s Sci-Fi fun in the paranoid future mould that seemed to thrive in the post-hippy era. This would make a good triple bill with Logan's Run and Soylent Green, all three sharing that combination of dark conspiracy theory and an air of 70s camp.

In this head-spinning future sport classic James Caan plays a champion Rollerballer. Rollerball is a high-speed combination of rollerskating, American Football, motorbike racing...

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes





The stella success of the original Planet of the Apes movie spawned a franchise that encompassed live action TV, a kids cartoon and four sequels. All the follow up films are entertaining, although diminishing budgets mean that some of the films are fun to watch for the wrong reasons! Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the first sequel and relates to a new crew, sent to rescue Taylor, the astronaut from the first movie....

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1958





The Nightmare That Threatens The World!


Don Siegal's classic slice of Cold War paranoia continues to send chills down the spine after over 50 years and several remakes.

Body Snatchers is set in the world of perfect 1950s small town Americana, A Norman Rockwell Idyll of conservative values and well behaved, perfectly manicured wives, where, seemingly from nowhere, mysterious vegetable...

Some time travel business now...


The Final Countdown





A modern aircraft carrier, captained by Kirk Douglas, is caught up in a supernatural storm that throws the ship back in time to a point just before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Habour. The situation presents the crew with one the great dilemmas in Sci-Fi cinema, do they make a pre-emptive attack against the Japanese carrier that is moving towards the habour, thus saving...

In Defence of Eurotrash


Some people on Twitter don't like the term Eurotrash to describe movies and they feel it's a insult to the art of movie making and that those who might use the term are somehow ignorant and unenlightened about cinema.

They also feel that people who use the term are only reviewing cult movies to be trendy or ironic. I'd argue differently. It takes a certain knowledge of cult cinema to apply the term correctly and besides, if you've actually...

Haze





Short claustrophobic horror movie from Shinya Tsukamoto, director of such genre-bending shockers a Tetsuo 1 & 2, Tokyo Fist and the brilliant A Snake Of June. The director himself stars in this strange fever dream of a movie in which a man wakes up locked in a cramped, lightless concrete room in which he can barely move.

Why is he there and where did he come from? We can see that he has a horrific stomach injury and that he is gradually...

Three on a Meathook





A lonely country boy called Billy lives on an isolated farm with his smothering and slightly mental father. Billy needs to be hidden away because he can't be trusted around other folks...especially women.

Billy is convinced that he murders them in a blind frenzy but has no memory of the crimes afterwards. This terrible fate will befall four young women who have car trouble and seek shelter at the farm. Soon each will...

Black Emanuelle

Black Emanuelle stars Laura Gemser stars as cult leader 'The Divine One' in this early 80s sexploitation movie about a bizarre cult. Members of the group all indulge in free love and anyone who doesn't fancy rutting with wild abandon gets whipped bloody in front of everyone as an exercise in humiliation. Add to this bizarre mix some head scratching contemporary dance numbers and a vague plot about the cult leaders boyfriend falling for a senators daughter, leading...

Conan the Barbarian





Arnie helped to define the early 80s Swords & Sandals revival with this epic tale of Iron age fantasy that would spawn copycat movies like the fantastic Beastmaster, as well as a spate of less than perfect Italian hack jobs.

Based on the fictional work of Robert E. Howard, the film sees Arnie play the eponymous hero, a hulk-like warrior of mercifully few words (most of which seem to be 'Crom'). The film opens with...

Death Walks at Midnight





A Great Example of the Italian Giallo horror genre that flourished in sleazier European cinemas during the late 60s/early 70s. A fashion model is drugged as part of a publicity stunt and while tripping out witnesses a nasty murder involving a masked man with a spiked glove. When her story is published she finds that the evil fiend is now stalking her and taking out her friends.

Typically stylish but nonsensical...

Phantasm





Phantasm: the delusion of a disordered mind, a phantasm, a spirit, a ghost!


Early outing from Don Coscarelli (Beastmaster, Bubba Ho Tep) in which a sinister undertaker known as "The Tall Man" steals people, shrinks them down and sends them through a portal into a hell dimension where they work as dwarf slaves. Anyone getting in the way gets chased by his silver death balls, shiny spheres with spikes that attach to your...