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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Critters Attack (Bobby Miller, 2019) DVD Review

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“You're not an idiot … more of a moron, really.” For 27 years the Critters franchise, which originally hit cinema screens in 1986 in the wake of the huge success of Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984), has pretty much laid dormant. Aside from a fantastic fan-made short film in 2014 (Jordan Downey's well received Critters: Bounty Hunter), those beloved fur balls with a monstrous appetite have been left to starve and gather dust. But, much like buses, you spend ages waiting for one only for two come along at the same time. Critters Attack! is not connected to the Shudder short series Critters: A New Binge (despite sharing the same production company), which was released in March 2019 to mixed reviews – but what of this fifth film in the carnivorous series: can it measure up like a rumbling post-feast rift, or will it fall flat like a pungent fart nobody in their right mind should have trusted?...

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Formula For A Murder (Alberto De Martino 1985) DVD Review

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“I must kill a man.” The 1980s were a bit of a lean time for gialli (the heyday of which was the early 1970s) what with splatterific American slasher movies dominating the horror genre at that time, but there was still room for Italian murder mysteries amidst the Jasons and Freddys and Michaels. Alberto De Martino's slow-burn killer thriller combines the priesthood, repressed memories, and that old motivator money in a story about a wealthy paraplegic sportswoman who spirals into a whirlwind of love and murder...

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Flavours of the Month: January 2019...

Rogue coppers, killer puppets, and off-colour tales are some of what has been setting the tone of my January 2019...

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Contraband (Lucio Fulci, 1980) DVD Review

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“Italy is starting to look like America in the thirties.” Otherwise known as The Smuggler, gore maestro Lucio Fulci's crime epic Contraband mixes old school Mafia romanticism and contemporary cynicism with extreme violence as cigarette smugglers face off with the new tough guy in town: a drug runner with a sadistic streak...

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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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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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Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Bo A. Vibenius, 1973) DVD Review

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“You better start praying, One Eye.” Perhaps better known under the title They Call Her One Eye, Bo A. Vibenius' stripped-back revenge thriller is an unusual sight to see come from Sweden, where serious art house cinema is more the norm. Mixing overt stylistic flourishes with hardcore sleaze, the tale of Frigga – a mute young woman recovering from a horrific ordeal in childhood – proves to be a tough but rewarding viewing experience, wrought from highly charged emotion and brutality...

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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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Francesca (Luciano Onetti, 2015) DVD Review

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“Through me you pass into the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain.” In recent years the 'neo-giallo' movement has grown, moving hand-in-hand with the re-evaluation of gialli from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, as well as the few that were released in the 1990s. Through DVD and now Blu-Ray – distributed by high quality and dedicated labels such as Arrow Video, 88 Films, Shameless Screen Entertainment (plus many more in various markets around the globe) – the genre has gained a whole new audience, with the films afforded lavish restoration and supplemental packages for unparallelled home viewing experiences. With the love spreading for these movies – made by filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Sergio Martino (among many others) – it was only natural that new examples of the genre would begin to appear. Masks, Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, and Yellow are all examples of this 'new old school' of highly stylised murder mystery – and the Argentinian Francesca (from the director of Sonno Profondo) is perhaps the one which nails the classic style closest of all...

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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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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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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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Don't Answer The Phone! (Robert Hammer, 1980) DVD Review

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“RUN – if you must. HIDE – if you can. SCREAM, but … He'll Know You're Alone!” Conceived of before John Carpenter's Halloween blew the doors wide open for the slasher movie craze that swept the horror genre during the 1980s, Robert Hammer's one and only film – Don't Answer The Phone! – is a curious schism between disturbing realism, dark humour, and jumping aboard the killer thriller bandwagon...

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