Flavours of the Month: June/July 2021...

Adventures in Nouvion, squealin' Italian wheels, and many a trip into the printed word are just some of what's been setting the tone of my June/July 2020, if you know what I mean and I think you do...

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The Zero Boys (Nico Mastorakis, 1986)

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“Eat your heart out, Sly.” You know how it is with so many slasher movies – pretty people making dumb decisions and splitting away from the group only to end up with a butcher knife through their face. But what if those genetically gifted college kids weren't so dumb? What if they did their utmost to stick together? What if they were armed with semi-automatics and TNT?...

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Death Smiles On A Murderer (Aristide Massaccesi, 1973) Blu-Ray Review

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“So many corpses, and every death a mystery.” Most commonly known as Joe D'Amato, the prolific director Aristide Massaccesi (Emmanuelle and The Last Cannibals) only attached his real name to just one of his cinematic endeavours, the turn-of-the-century ghoulishly Gothic supernatural giallo Death Smiles On A Murderer. The Italian giallo movement wasn't best known for rock solid plotting logic, but Massaccessi's film dives head first into a zone of storytelling that can only be described as utterly baffling. Prepare for copious plot holes, taboo subject matter, an ethereal sense of time, and Klaus Kinski 'doing science'...

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Season of the Witch (George A. Romero, 1972) Blu-Ray Review...

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“I thought you were intrigued by it when you were so afraid. Being afraid is necessary to believing.” While it came as a commercial disappointment, the second in as many years for George A. Romero (following on from 1971's There's Always Vanilla), his 1972 film Season of the Witch proves to be an intriguing companion piece to its predecessor. Amidst the fervour of social change that was sweeping America at the time (particularly the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment), Season of the Witch peeks behind the white picket fences of suburbia to witness one housewife's attempt to escape her mid-life malaise – through Witchcraft...

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There's Always Vanilla (George A. Romero, 1971) Blu-Ray Review...

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“Anything that has something happening has a purpose to it.” An experimental bitter-sweet romance drama is not what you'd expect to be directed by George A. Romero, the Godfather of the modern zombie, whose seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead not only defined a new sub-genre, but a new way of utilising horror to examine the world in which we live. Seeking to not be pigeon-holed by the horror genre, Romero and production company The Latent Image embarked on this character piece, which turned into a scattered and tense production with a final product that limped onto the silver screen after which it became a 'lost' film in Romero's catalogue. Indeed, Romero himself described the film as “an awful experience and I care very little about it”, but even with – seemingly – so little going for it, There's Always Vanilla now proves to be an intriguing time capsule of Pittsburgh, and America, in 1970...

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The Pyjama Girl Case (Flavio Mogherini, 1978) Blu-Ray Review

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“Just because it's written down it's true, huh?” By 1978 the heyday of the Italian murder mystery – or 'giallo' – had been and gone, but that didn't mean there was nothing of interest still to rinse out of the well-strained genre. Writer/Director Flavio Mogherini's murder mystery casts aside much of the classic tropes and visual styling of the typical giallo film (black gloved killers, gleaming knives, an escalating series of grisly deaths, European glamour) in favour of – egads! - just one murder in, of all places, Australia's Sydney with its sun, sea, and sand. Do not go into this movie expecting killer thrills by any means and, whatever you do, don't read the spoilerific blurb on the back of the box!...

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The Suspicious Death of a Minor (Sergio Martino, 1975) Blu-Ray Review

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“There's one death too many in this story.” The top two names associated with giallo cinema are that of its creator Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace) and that of its master Dario Argento (Deep Red), but another director whose name should be closely associated with those two is Sergio Martino (The Mountain of the Cannibal God). In the first half of the 1970s, Martino, along with frequent collaborating screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (Almost Human), produced a slew of all-time greats in the feverish onslaught of Italian murder mysteries: The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971), The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1971), All The Colours of the Dark (1972), Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (1972), and Torso (1973).

That's quite an impressive resume in itself, in careers that spanned 66 directorial efforts from Martino and 123 writing credits for Gastaldi. However, there is another gialli that was produced during their time working together, but one which has flown somewhat under the radar while the aforementioned titles have taken the lion's share of viewers' attention: 1975's The Suspicious Death of a Minor. Crafted with Martino's eye for style and Gastaldi's acerbic storytelling, it arrived at a time when the giallo (lurid tales of sex and death) was beginning to cool off and the poliziotteschi (gritty urban crime thrillers) were attracting audiences with rough 'n' tumble rogue cops tackling the sort of criminal conspiracies that were happening everyday beyond the cinema's doorstep...

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Microwave Massacre (Wayne Berwick, 1983) Blu-Ray Review

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“I got an idea all right, but I think it's against the law.” Everything you need to know about the tone of Wayne Berwick's Microwave Massacre can be gleaned from the opening sequence. Strutting in with an foot-tappingly catchy funkadelic opening theme, Marla Simon (credited as 'Knothole Girl') – in figure-hugging high 'n' tight jeans – jiggles her way down a suburban street brandishing all kinds of swagger. She happens upon a construction site and a hole in a wall, in which her ample assets become lodged after a creep gooses her. Two workers spy the scene unveiling itself from the other side and charge in goggle-eyed wonder – but they miss out at the last second. Yep, it's the 1970s and this goofy brand of working men's club humour is the order of the day. It's the sort of thing you might have seen in the work of Russ Meyer or those “Confessions...” movies with all their waggling eyebrows and double entendres, as a schlub in search of a simple working man's meal discovers culinary cannibalism as the solution...

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The Mutilator (Buddy Cooper, 1984) Blu-Ray Review...

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“By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye!” In the wake of Sean S. Cunningham's 1980 slasher flick Friday the 13^th (perhaps the ultimate in killer franchises) there came a glut of gore-soaked low budget maniac movies in which a slew of tender teens came face-to-face with meat cleavers, chainsaws, fishermen's hooks and all varieties of sharp objects. When Victor Miller wrote Friday the 13^th, he studied prior films in the genre – most notably John Carpenter's seminal Halloween (1978) – finding the beats and working with them closely and, in the case of Buddy Cooper's The Mutilator (aka Fall Break), a similar path was taken, but with some playful tweaks thrown into the mix...

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Flavours of the Month: July 2018...

Crash by way of Ballard and Cronenberg, the 1970s and 1980s through Netflix's eyes, and trashy horror flicks are just some of what's been setting the tone of my July 2018...

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Flavours of the Month: June 2018...

Grotty grindhouse flicks, 90s rave tracks, and Palahniuk's most daring novel in years is just some of what's been setting the tone of my June 2018...

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Flavours of the Month: May 2018...

Bundles of Blu-Rays, aerial dog fights from a century ago, and FWOAN's first big screening have been setting the tone of my May 2018...

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Milano Calibro 9 (Fernando Di Leo, 1972) Blu-Ray Review

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“Society makes its criminals suffer and after that it ignores them.” Fernando Di Leo's crime flick gets off to an explosive start as, to the energetic sounds of prog rock, a package containing a large quantity of cash is transferred from one person to another amidst the autumnal streets and neon-lit subways of Milan, only for the real package to get switched with a fake somewhere along the line. The carriers are braced one-by-one in increasingly violent fashion – heads smashed into vases, faces slashed with straight razors – but to no avail; the money has vanished. So now, according to the rules of this vicious gang, they must be taken care of – by blowing them all up with dynamite! Now that's how you start a movie...

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Hell Comes To Frogtown (R.J. Kizer and Donald G. Jackson, 1988) Review

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“Well maybe you oughta try making love to a complete stranger in the middle of a hostile mutant territory and see how you like it!” The 1980s saw (for a time at least) the last terrifying hurrah of the threat posed by global nuclear decimation as slamming a fist upon the red button gave way to deals, draw-downs, and perestroika. At the time, however, the possibility of a radioactive apocalypse was still very real – perhaps as real as it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis (as detailed in Joe Dante's Matinee) – and as such, the topic was ripe for plundering to form the basis of many genre pictures that did gang busters business on the video rental circuit. With the likes of Creepozoids (David DeCoteau, 1987), the atomic paranoia of the real world painted a bleak future to be expressed on the silver screen – and sometimes that included gun-toting man-sized frog men on the hunt for fertile women, as was the case with Hell Comes To Frogtown...

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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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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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The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (Emilio P Miraglia, 1971) Blu-Ray Review

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“It's not uncommon for a man to do strange things to get his kicks.” The opening companion piece to Miraglia's 1972 gothic-tinged giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave treads similar ground to its successor. Miraglia juxtaposes the old and new worlds whereby the cutting edge design of the 1970s sits amidst a crumbling ancestral home built from stone and sordid family secrets. Riddled with nihilism, this forever-twisting tale of a sadomasochistic fetishist and his not-quite-so-dead wife is soaked-through with moral decay...

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Evil Ed (Anders Jacobsson, 1995) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“I'm just another chunk of meat lost in brain land.” Striking out of Sweden as the blood-soaked antithesis of Ingmar Bergman, Anders Jacobsson's Evil Ed – reportedly made with a budget equivalent to a mere two-and-a-half seconds worth of Jurassic Park – is a frantic and gleefully over-the-top horror comedy crammed to the gills with references to American splatter epics. In some ways it is the ultimate fan film crafted by obsessives of blood 'n' guts cinema, and yet – first appearing in the UK in the dying years of James Ferman's censorious grip on the British Board of Film Classification – when horror was still tantamount to smut – Evil Ed comes as a rebel yell against the Mary Whitehouse types of the world. Hands off our gore, it screams, take your scissors and shove 'em where the sun doesn't shine!

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The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (Emilio P Miraglia, 1972) Blu-Ray Review

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“The Corpse That Didn't Want To Die!” Following on from The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (1971), writer/director Emilio P. Miraglia once again dived into the glamorous pool of the lurid European murder mystery with The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (otherwise known as The Lady In Red Kills Seven Times), a violent clash of morals set against a fractured backdrop where two worlds collide: that of a Gothic castle and that of a modernist fashion house. This is a film consumed with ideas of wealth and the inevitability of hereditary sin...

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Flavours of the Month: May 2017...

Dark cinematic delights, the funny side of the apocalypse, and the jewel in the Formula 1 crown are some of what's been setting the tone of my May 2017...

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