Castle Freak (Stuart Gordon, 1995) DVD Review

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“I could wake you up, Sleeping Beauty. You are in my castle.” Director Stuart Gordon and actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton had a good run together with the iconic 'H.P. Lovecraft meets splatter' flick one-two punch of Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). However, with those two titanic entries in the horror genre, one of their other efforts – 1995's Castle Freak – has flown somewhat under the radar. Re-teaming with screenwriter Dennis Paoli, Gordon explores some deeply dark themes as he pits a self-imploding family man against the embodiment of his monstrous, tortured soul...

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Splatter University (Richard W. Haines, 1984) Blu-Ray Review

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“It seems to me that if you're going to kill someone you at least get to know them real well.” From the director of Class of Nuke 'Em High, Splatter University – otherwise known as Campus Killings – is a cheap as chips horror comedy in which a bunch of reprehensible, unteachable college kids test their new teacher's patience while getting bumped off during the new semester. The trailer and 'back of the box blurb' sell it skilfully, but what's it really like – a forgotten gem, a dropped turd, or perhaps a malodorous diamond?

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Nightmare Beach (1988) Mini Review...

What's it about?
The leader of a biker gang is executed for the crime of murder, but when his body goes missing and rowdy Spring Breakers start turning up dead-by-electrocution, the authorities desperately try to keep a lid on things - but the bodies keep piling up.
Who would I recognise in it?
John Saxon, Michael Parks, Lance LeGault.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Directed by Umberto Lenzi (Syndicate Sadists, Eyeball) under a pseudonym, Nightmare Beach was one of his last directorial outings - into which he put little effort (as he himself admitted). Coming in after years of slasher movies, this cheap little killer flick - written by Vittorio Rambaldi (with some rushed rewrites by Umberto Lenzi) - proves to be a rather mixed bag. Indeed, just in terms of acting, the movie comes across rather schizophrenic. The ever-reliable John Saxon (A Nightmare On Elm Street) plays a sheriff doing the dirty bidding of a mayor who's only worry is not scaring off tourists (*ahem* Jaws *ahem*), while Michael Parks (Red State) plays an alcoholic doctor/pathologist/pervert, and Lance LeGault (The A-Team) gleefully hams it up as a Bible-clutching priest - all good stuff, but the rest of the acting on-show ranges wildly from under-sold to reprehensible. Mind you, in a movie like this (ideal VHS rental fodder), that's part of the fun...

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The Best of 80s Scream Queens (David DeCoteau, 1987-1989) Blu-Ray Review

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“Hell Just Got a Lot Hotter!” Three low budget genre movies on two discs: Nightmare Sisters, Murder Weapon, and Deadly Embrace; with three legendary scream queens popping up (and popping out) across them all: Brinke Stevens, Linnea Quigley, and Michelle Bauer. Fans of 1980s VHS flicks, roll on up for 247 minutes worth of low budget run-and-gun exploitation as sorority nerds are possessed by a succubus, two psychotic mob daughters throw a house party, and a desperate housewife entertains the pool boy...

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Nail Gun Massacre (Terry Lofton & Bill Leslie, 1985) Blu-Ray Review

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“Now, now. You shouldn't really fall to pieces over me.” Cheaper than a chainsaw, pointier than a pointy thing, this low budget revenge-fuelled slasher brings bargain basement gore to the woods of rural Texas where a maniac with an aversion to amorous couples and construction workers is on the rampage. Cobbled together by determined first-time film makers and exploited by unscrupulous distributors for decades, the journey towards wider recognition has been an arduous one for Nail Gun Massacre, a gritty DIY horror from the heyday of the video cassette that is adored just as much for its unintentional goofs as it is for its scripted sarcasm...

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Syndicate Sadists (Umberto Lenzi, 1975) DVD Review

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“I'm not scared now that you're here.” All the boys admire Rambo (Thomas Milian, The Cynic, The Rat, and The Fist), the rogue with a scuffed heart of gold, as director Umberto Lenzi (Nightmare Beach) mashes Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy with The Godfather for this well-crafted poliziotteschi where a drifter rides in on a (steel) horse and gets entangled with two criminal gangs. Italy in the 1970s was a hotbed of headline-grabbing violence from high profile kidnappings to home-grown terrorism, and it was against this backdrop that 'Eurocrime' films dashed onto silver screens in a cacophony of squealing tires and blazing guns...

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Delirium (Lamberto Bava, 1987) Blu-Ray Review

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“Sounds like you enjoy playing the victim.” The 1970s saw an explosion of 'giallo' films produced by Italian filmmakers after the success of Dario Argento's début film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, a murder mystery that twisted sex and violence together in a bravura package of style and warped psychology. As the decade wore on the flood turned into a trickle, but the American slasher movie craze that came in the wake of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13^th (1980) saw somewhat of a revival of blood-soaked mysteries in Italy with the likes of Tenebrae (1982) and A Blade In The Dark (1983). However, once again, the craze waned, but spurts of brilliance still emerged with Argento's Terror at the Opera (1987) – in which a bullet penetrates a peep hole to brain-splattering effect – or, in this case, Lamberto Bava's psycho-sexual mystery slasher Delirium (aka La Foto Di Gioia) – in which a woman with a big, veiny eyeball for a face gets skewered with a pitchfork … now that got you intrigued, didn't it?

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Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984) DVD Review

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“You only get peace when you can impose it.” Lamberto Bava, son of the iconic Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, never quite achieved the creative heights of his father's catalogue of cinematic treats (Mario kick started the entire giallo movement with The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963), but he has nonetheless carved out a recognised and beloved niche in Italian genre cinema. Macabre, Body Puzzle, A Blade in the Dark, Delirium, and particularly Demons, will all be familiar to aficionados of European exploitation movies, but whereas Demons dispensed with characterisation and any shred of plot logic in favour of scatter gun gore, Lamberto's 1984 action thriller Blastfighter crafts a character-rich story which dispenses frequent action while still keeping the viewer emotionally invested...

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Man From Deep River (Umberto Lenzi, 1972) DVD Review

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“He dared the forbidden river where adventure ends and hell begins!” This former 'video nasty' is regarded as the first film in the cycle of Italian cannibal movies that reared their bloody heads throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River – otherwise known as Deep River Savages, Sacrifice!, or Mondo Cannibale – ironically features very little flesh eating. Instead, the film focuses more on the culture clash that comes about when a photojournalist from the western world is captured by a remote tribe somewhere in the wilds between Thailand and Burma - as 88 Films' DVD presentation inspires heated debate...

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Massacre In Dinosaur Valley (Michele Massimo Tarantini, 1985) DVD Review

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“It's the land of the Aquata, they're also head hunters, still practising. What's more, some of them are cannibals besides, but I hear the God they venerate is some kind of animal.” The Italian cannibal movie cycle seemingly died a spectacular death in 1981 with Umberto Lenzi's savage Cannibal Ferox, which was otherwise known in American under the particularly memorable title 'Make Them Die Slowly' when it was released stateside in 1983 to thunderous success (1980's Cannibal Holocaust didn't hit America until 1985). The noise of the box office kerchings rang all the way back to Italy and so, further bolstered by the warm reception afforded to jungle adventure romp Romancing The Stone, the Italians returned to the green inferno to deliver Massacre In Dinosaur Valley to the masses...

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Flavours of the Month: January 2018...

Tech-savvy portmanteau tales, numerous shades of horror, and Hollywood tell-alls are just some of what's been setting the tone of my January 2018...

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Live Like A Cop Die Like A Man (Ruggero Deodato 1976) DVD Review

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“What are we coming to when they let common criminals join the police?” Ruggero Deodato will perhaps forever be inextricably linked to his notorious grand guignol video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, but the famous Italian director tried his hands at numerous genres. He dabbled in gialli with the likes of The Washing Machine, for instance, albeit in the 1990s long after the movement's heyday in the 1970s. Indeed, three genres ruled supreme at the Italian box office – the aforementioned gialli (bloody murder mysteries), sex comedies, and crime films (generally referred to as poliziotteschi), and it is in this latter category that Deodato produced one of his finest films. Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man (what a fantastic title!) is an ultra-charged poliziottescho that knows no bounds of shame, as tough-as-nails coppers take on the dangerous world of crime...

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Cold Blooded Beast (Fernando Di Leo, 1971) Blu-Ray Review

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“How nice to be sent to a famous loony bin!” Straddling the lines between the gialli thrillers and softcore romps that were so popular with mainstream audiences in Italy during the 1970s, Fernando (Milano Calibro 9) Di Leo's skin 'n' kills movie Cold Blooded Beast (otherwise known as Slaughter Hotel) features a bevy of beautiful women inflagranti and in peril, as well as Werner Herzog's notorious performer Klaus Kinski…

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Flavours of the Month: November 2017...

Rogue cops, dessicated ghouls, beautifully restored horrors, and wandering the wasteland - some of what has set the tone of my October 2017.

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Dr Alien (David DeCoteau, 1989) DVD Review

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“One minute I'm standing there and the next thing I know they're all over me like mud on a pig.” Following on from Creepozoids, Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-o-rama, and Nightmare Sisters, David DeCoteau rounded out the 1980s with this teen boy fantasy/comedy that was also known as 'I Was A Teenage Sex Mutant'. Zany from the get-go, it features deliberately on-the-nose humour, many-an-exposed-set-of-norks, substitute professors in lingerie, and an alien proboscis that sprouts from a college nerd's head to act as a powerful aphrodisiac!

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Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals (Joe D'Amato, 1977) DVD Review

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“The tribe we are to locate are indeed cannibals – tie up their victims, rip open their bellies, tear out their insides, and eat it.” Joe D'Amato – otherwise known as Aristide Massaccesi – the director of such grotesque delights as Anthropophagous (1980), is unlikely to go down in the annals of cinema history as a master filmmaker with a deeply considered artistic vision. His work may skew towards slap dash schlock, but he got the job done and knew to never play coy: if his audiences wanted devoured innards and boobies flopping about everywhere then that's exactly what he was going to give them – and this is undoubtedly the case with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals...

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The Bogey Man (Ulli Lommel, 1980) DVD Review

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“The Most Terrifying Nightmare of Childhood is About to Return!” Combining dark themes of childhood trauma with slasher movie tropes, The Bogey Man (or Boogey Man, if you prefer) – a former 'Video Nasty' in the UK – tries to do something original with the genre at a time when the formula was being set that others would blindly follow...

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Flavours of the Month: March 2017...

Dirty coppers, saucy times in Venice, and antics around San Francisco are some of what's been setting the tone of my March 2017...

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Creepozoids (David DeCoteau, 1987) DVD Review

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“More acid, more megatons – it ain't over yet.” David DeCoteau's low budget creature feature has aspirations walking in the footsteps of Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), but let's be honest, those are far out of reach. However, influenced at the time by the last dregs of Cold War nuclear paranoia, Creepozoids – with its bleak world view and gooey practical effects – provides a charming dose of VHS era sci-fi horror. The year is 1998 and World War III has turned planet Earth into a nuked-out husk where nomads and survivors populate the wastelands as the fighting rages on...

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Killer Workout (David A Prior, 1987) DVD Review

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“The workout will kill you!” Otherwise known as Aerobicide, David A. Prior's (Deadly Prey) late-in-the-cycle slasher flick – and feature début – is perhaps the most unabashedly 'eighties' of them all. Beauties clad in Day-Glo Lycra writhing to terrible pop music in the quest for bodily perfection? Check. Convertible Porsches and muscled-up bros with dodgy hair styles? Check. Conspicuous shots of condoms in the wake of the AIDS crisis that was dominating the decade? Check. Visor caps, frizzy hair, and ankle socks? That'll be a big old check on that, too. In some ways, for good and bad, the 1980s have never left us – not in these specific ways, mind you – but the decade of greed and synthesised music has been back in vogue for a while now. But does that mean Killer Workout is any good? Let's find out...

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