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...

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,...

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...

CLIPS FROM THIRST

...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Female Yakuza Tale





For fans of other Female lead Japanese exploitation movies like Lady Snowblood or the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, Female Yakuza Tale is going to be a must see. The Japanese made sleazy movies with undeniable style and this film has all the graphic elements that make these movies so good even 30 years after they were first produced.

In this one a women called Ocho is captured by a drug dealing cartel who use Chinese...

Dead or Alive: Final





Apologies: I can only find the trailer with a Spanish narration. Enjoy the visuals. Unless your Spanish that is...


After what seems like an age, Takashi Miike's concluding episode of the Dead or Alive series finallly gots a UK outing on DVD. Tartan released the first two parts during the initial rush to release quirky Japanese extreme cinema, It was a few years before UK fans could get their hands on the concluding...

Visitor Q





Visitor Q was part of a V-Cinema (Japanese "Straight-to-video genre) series on the nature of love


In which the already taboo busting Japanese director of such close to the bone entertainment as Ichi The Killer, Full Metal Yakuza and Imprint decides to try and offend everyone on the face of the earth with a low budget shot on video opus that seeks to scramble your synapses by throwing as much degradation and filth onto...

Full Metal Yakuza





In Full Metal Yakuza, director Takashi Miike, maker of such extreme Japanese movies as Zebraman, Ichi The Killer and One Missed Call, steals the plot from Robocop, as a downtrodden low ranking gangster is transformed into a robot-killing machine by a crazy science guy. Our lowly gangster goes from meek servant to the gang boss, from a natural target for bullies to a super-strong fighting warrior who in one memorable scene in a car...

Danger Diabolik





Well, here it is, one of the greatest slices of kitsch 60s pop-art cinema ever produced.

Directed by Italian genre expert Mario Bava, this comic book tale of crime capers and daring heists is the source the Beastie Boys video for Body Movin', in which they use footage from the movie.

Telling the OTT story of Diabolik (John Phillip Law), a masked international thief and his blond bombshell girlfriend as...

If I was 30 years older I'd marry Ingrid Pitt...

Countess Dracula





Hammers most voluptuous Scream Queen, Ingrid Pitt stars in a film loosely based on the notorious Countess Bathory, a genuine character from the darker annals of medieval European history, although I wouldn't want to vouch for the veracity of Hammer's take on here story.

She is a withered old crone who longs for the erotic attentions of a young stud who has...

Scared To Death





Lugosi's only starring role in a colour film is not among his best work, but Bela is never boring to watch, even in a real crud like 'Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla' (you can't make these titles up...).

In Scared To Death we follow the narration of a deceased woman who describes the events leading to her demise. Opening in a morgue, we here that a beautiful lady has died of fright, but how did such a terrible thing...

Bride of the Monster





Bride of the Monster is an essential movie for all students of trash film making, a classic Z-grade shocker from the master of bad movies, Ed Wood.

Bela Lugosi stars in this poverty stricken sci-fi effort as a mad doctor (is there any other kind?) who kidnaps twelve men and attempts to use atomic energy to turn them into super-humans. A sassy female journalist gets wind of his scheme, heads up to his lair to investigate...

I Monster





I Monster is an early 70s retelling of the old Jeckyll & Hyde story in which the names have been changed, presumably to protect the innocent.

Produced by UK horror studio Amicus in the early 70s and starring the always intriguing Christopher Lee, It tells the grisly tale of a Dr Marlowe, who discovers a drug that lowers all inhibition, causing rather proper English ladies to divest themselves of their clothing while reducing...

Republished from my days reviewing for "The Man". As before, these were meant to be viewed individually as people browsed the site, so there's a few repeated points.

Whether my reviews helped to shift any product is another matter...


Tokyo X Erotica





Skirting that fine line between art and pornography, Japanese "Pink Cinema" constantly pushes the boundaries of taste and decency. As an example of this genre, Tokyo...

I really rate these odd Spanish oddities. These are from "that high street retailers" site that I used to pen reviews for. So there's some repetition. Don't let that spoil the wonky euro-trash fun though...


Tombs Of The Blind Dead





Classic low rent zombie action, a product of the prolific Spanish horror industry of the 70s. As the countries dictator Franco's power faded in that decade new generation of exploitation film makers...

The Wasp Woman





The Woman's Driving Passion is to be... Queen of Beauty


She has the head and hands of a wasp but the body of a beautiful woman she is...Wasp Women.

Another production line cheapy from Roger Corman before he hit critical pay-dirt with his series of Edgar Allen Poe films, this isn't high art but for tacky movie aficionados it'll hit all the right buttons.

The head of a successful cosmetics...

Dracula Vs Frankenstein





Al Adamson should win a posthumous Oscar for services to the trashy drive-in movie! Whether it be cheap Kung Fu knock offs, scummy biker flicks or this ghost-train wreck of a movie, his films may have been terrible, but they were never dull.

Cobbled together from other unfinished projects, Dracula Vs Frankenstein has it all, Mad scientists hiding out in fair ground attractions, deranged hunched back assistants...

Hell gate





This is one of those weird low budget 80s horror movies that helped to fill the shelves of video store horror sections back in the day. Treading a strange line between the horrific, the dreamlike and the comedic, it's definitely a product of it's time featuring lots of splashy gore , rubbery monster effects and soft focus dreamy bits. Like so much 80s US horror product, it's seems to steal it's surreal, fever dream atmosphere from Suspiria,...

Scrubbers





A female response to the borstal classic Scum, Scrubbers follows two girls who escape from an open youth prison. Annetta longs to see her daughter who is being cared for by a convent while Carol wants to be recaptured so she can return to the high security prison where her girlfriend is being held. Carol's wish comes true when she is apprehended and returned to custody, but her world is shattered when she finds out that her lover, Doreen,...

Hellraiser





Clive Barker's seminal horror movie Hellraiser, is a gore drenched yarn about a man, Frank, who becomes trapped in a hell dimension of perfect pain when he messes around with a cursed mechanical box. On solving the puzzle of the cube he his dragged into the realm of the Cenobites, a race of S&M demons who pierce and tear at his flesh with spiked chains, torturing him to a state of agonizing ecstasy. Our violent anti-hero returns to the earthly...

Dracula





A late 70s, big budget studio take on the Dracula tale starring a vampire lord whose style is more Discotastic Barry Manilow then broodingly Gothic Bela Lugosi. Frank Langella is the brooding count in this beautifully staged if campy version of Bram Stoker's classic horror tale of blood sucking terror.

When a ship is grounded off the coast of Whitby the only survivor is Count Dracula. He has arrived with a big consignment of...

Madman





"Deep In The Woods, Lurks A Hideous Evil... Don't Even Whisper His Name!"

A minor classic of the stalk 'n' slash movie explosion that followed in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th, Madman plays to every cliché in the slasher movie book but pulls it off thanks to it's streak of nasty gore, a suspense filled atmosphere and a fast pace, a must when your dealing with illogical horror movies. So many films of the era suffered...

Curse of the Crimson Altar





Second division horror from the Hammer Studio's chief rivals, Tigon,The Curse of the Crimson Altar features three of the horror genres biggest stars, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Euro-Scream Queen, Barbara Steele, in a campy witchcraft tale for fans of kitsch 60s gothic.

Mark Eden plays Robert Manning, a man who finds out that his brother, Peter, has mysteriously disappeared. Robert visits an isolated...

Corridors of blood





Karloff returned to classy British horror in the late 50s after 25 years with the grisly Victorian gothic of 'Corridors of Blood'.

Karloff plays a surgeon troubled by the agony caused by his craft as effective anaesthesia has yet to be developed. His experiments into finding a solution bare fruit when he makes laughing gas but his demonstration in front of his peers goes wrong when a patient wakes up half way through...

Night of the Eagle

A sensible university academic played by Peter Wyngarde is looking forward to a bright future until he finds out that his wife has been concealing magical charms around their home, believing that they will protect and bring good luck. He tells her to destroy them but this turns out to be a grave error as his luck is about to change, bringing a whole mess of trouble.

A quirky old fashioned little spook show, Night of the Eagle plays up to the old cliches...

The Blood Beast Terror





A shaky but fun slice of British Schlock from the Tigon studio, who brought such classics as Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan's Claw to the screen. Although this cheap programmer isn't in the same league as those movies, it's still a good watch for fans of the ropier end of Brit horror thanks to the ridiculous concept of a "were-moth" on a killing rampage, combined with Peter Cushing, as ever remaining quietly dignified...

The Beast Must Die





Extremely naff but riotously funny British horror movie from the mid 70s which features a silly gimmick that B-movie hustler William Castle, producer of prop heavy 50s drive-in shockers like The Tingler, would have been proud of...

This strange horror movie asks the audience at the top of the film to try and identify the lupine fiend responsible for a spate of bloody killings and then pauses for a "Werewolf Break" at...

Peeping Tom





Director Michael Powell went from being a darling of the British film industry to a virtual pariah with this difficult and, at the time of it's release, deeply controversial proto-slasher.

Mark Lewis is a seemingly ordinary young man with an evil secret...he loves to kill women and capture the agonies of their final moments in film. As a child his father, a scientist, performed some nasty experiments on Mark's nervous system...

Near Dark





A compelling and stylish 80s vampire flick that beats The Lost Boys hands down in terms of character, action and gore, Near Dark tells the story of a gang of bloodsuckers who don't come from a noble line of high born vampires. They aren't rich and louche, they never hang out in pricey Gothic nightclubs, there's no great vampiric conspiracy and they don't live in plush penthouses. Near Dark is about white trash vampires, and it's all the more...

Jess Franco's Fu Manchu Movies




Clip from Blood of Fu Manchu


Christopher Lee turns in another couple stern faced performances as the racially dubious Far Eastern criminal mastermind Fu Manchu, a character who would have fitted perfectly into the Bond Movies of the 1960s. At the Helm of these late entries in the Fu Manchu cycle is sleaze kingpin Jess Franco, whose career was peaking at the time thanks to the patronage of Producer Harry...

Hanzo the Razor





Having shelled out top dollar for a pricey import, these three notorious and slightly dubious Japanese exploitation movies are now available in the UK.

These are Katzu productions, the same people who brought us the Lone Wolf & Cub (Shogun Assassin) and Lady Snowblood pictures. Hanzo is a samurai police officer in the Edo period of Japanese history. Unlike his fellow officers however, he is above corruption, which causes...

Bad Boy Bubby



A real Australian oddity from the early 90s, Bad Boy Bubby takes that quirky, slightly off kilter style that you find in even the most mainstream of Antipodean movies and runs with it, creating a bleak, sick and funny movie which may well appall some viewers but will find a home with horror fans who have a taste for the bizarre.

Bubby is a bad, bad boy. His mother has kept him locked away for 30 years, telling him that the air outside...

The Witches





More production line horror fun from the Hammer Studio now, with The Witches, a scary vehicle for Actress Joan Fontaine who plays a school teacher struck by a nervous breakdown following an unpleasant run in with voodoo witchcraft while teaching in Africa.

When she returns to Britain she is hired by a rich family to become head teacher at a small private school in an isolated rural village. In classic Hammer style the villagers...

She


Cheesy Hammer entertainment that steps away from horror and attempts to bring the work of H. Rider Haggard to the screen. Haggard wrote many a boys-own adventure romp in the 19th century with books like King Solomon's Mines and She being made into successful movies. She is definitely a kitsch, low budget entry in the canon of high adventure films and tells the dangerous tale of two men discharged from the army after WW1 in Palestine.

One is kidnapped and...

Quatermass and the Pit





Hammer produced an excellent cinematic re-spin of the groundbreaking TV Sci-Fi with this late 60s offering. It's packed with suspense and intelligent writing despite the obvious age of the movie, especially in the special effects department. Anyone seeking out this film will probably be prepared to overlook any creakiness caused by it's elderly status and will hopefully be able to throw themselves right into this spirited and...

Plague of the Zombies





Although not as well known as the studio's Dracula and Frankenstein movies, Hammer's Plague of the Zombies rates as one of their most satisfying productions, managing to balance the delightful camp that we all ironically enjoy 40 years after the fact with some real chills.

Opening on some stereotypical voodoo rituals*, we move swiftly on to James Forbes, a medical professor who has received a letter from a former...

Deep River Savages





Made a good few years before the late 70s / early 80s spate of gut munching cannibal epics, Deep River Savages might be described as a ground breaking feat of cinematic innovation in an alternate universe. On this planet however, it's a tawdry slice of eurotrash exploitation that, although not as graphic as later entries in the genre cycle which upped the atrocity footage to extreme levels, stills packs a nasty punch.
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Cold Eyes of Fear





London set Giallo thriller with a great funky score form Ennio Morricone. A head scratching mess of a film featuring some truly horrendous London accents dubbed into the mouths of bottom rung actors. This shouldn't put of the trash cinema fan however, as the tacky plot and wacky ideas come thick and fast in this deliriously silly shocker. Gang fights, sexy murders staged for clapping audiences and hilariously executed threats from...