Showing posts with label screen caps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screen caps. Show all posts

Saturday, 12 October 2019

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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Friday, 15 February 2019

Body Melt (Philip Brophy, 1993) Review

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“The first phase is hallucinogenic, the second phase is glandular, and the third phase is … OH GOD!!!” From Street Trash to The Incredible Melting Man as well as The Stuff, the last portion of the 20th Century seemed to have a thing for the ooze-tastic destruction of the human body, almost building upon the 'body horror' of David Cronenberg, albeit in a sleazier and sillier manner. A lesser-known entry in this sub-category of splatter-fuelled flicks is Body Melt, an Australian B-Movie that takes a few cues from Peter Jackson's early films and sprinkles a dusting of 90s rave culture style into the mix – oh, and Harold Bishop from Neighbours is in it, too!


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Wednesday, 8 August 2018

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 13th (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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Monday, 9 July 2018

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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Sunday, 10 June 2018

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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Tuesday, 6 March 2018

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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Wednesday, 10 January 2018

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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Friday, 6 October 2017

Zombie Lake (Jean Rollin, 1981) Review


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“We better face the fact that zombies have declared war!” Originally to be directed by Jess Franco (Sadomania, Oasis of the Zombies), this cheap-as-chips slice of Eurociné cheese was, for many years, disowned by its replacement director Jean Rollin (A Virgin Among The Living Dead). In a remote French town, several years after the end of World War II, something deadly – and bright green – is rising from the so-called 'lake of the damned'. Zombified Nazis, bare boobs galore, and a complete disregard for the laws of continuity dominate this movie, which was destined to be a drinking game only for those with the hardiest of livers...


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Friday, 15 April 2016

Pervert! (Jonathan Yudis, 2006) DVD Review...

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“I'm like a French bread – the longer I'm around, the harder I get.” In his heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, Russ Meyer was the king of the American sexploitation film. Voluptuous women bouncing and bonking around the desert, crazy characters chewing the scenery, and a scatter gun editing style that pre-dated music videos by many-a-year provided a heady mix for audiences. However, in the age of super fast broadband, such softcore silliness is positively tame – but Director Jonathan Yudis and Writer Mike Davis buck reality to combine their Meyer nostalgia, and fondness of the female form, for Pervert! – a whacked-out 'n saucy dose of jiggly boobs, dutch angles, and heat-driven madness...


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Friday, 22 January 2016

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963) Blu-Ray/DVD Review


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“Don't you see it over there? Blood. Blood everywhere!” Originally intended to be a frothy romcom about tourists on an adventure in Rome, when horror maestro Mario Bava (Black Sunday) entered the project, it changed into something altogether darker. Not only did Bava transform the film, but he altered the face of murder mystery cinema. Tracing its roots through Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, the German 'Krimi' films, and Hitchcock, the giallo film – named after the yellow colour of pulp novels detailing lurid murders and twisted crimes – was birthed by Bava.


The genre, which he would finesse the following year with the technicolour terror of Blood and Black Lace, was turned – by Dario Argento (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage), Sergio Martino (All The Colours of the Dark), et al – into a hugely popular cinematic movement. So successful were the gialli, in-part through their sexuality and blood-splashing violence, that the American slasher film came to pass (Bava's own A Bay of Blood gave particular inspiration to Friday the 13th Part 2). The importance of giallo films in the history of genre cinema cannot be overstated. The transition, from paperback to celluloid, happened here: The Girl Who Knew Too Much...


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Saturday, 2 January 2016

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) DVD Review...


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“They won't be singing kum-ba-ya, they'll ve screaming kum-ba-noooooooo!” Taking the bulk of it's cues from Sean S. Cunningham's iconic 'slasher flick that defined the 80s' Friday the 13th (1980), The Final Girls (not to be confused with the entirely unrelated Final Girl) is a meta comedy-horror mash-up in which a group of friends attend a screening of 'Camp Bloodbath', only to end up journeying into the film itself. However, if they thought it was going to be difficult escaping the machete-wielding Billy Murphy, they clearly didn't stop to think about getting their camp counsellor cohorts – pre-destined to fornicate with abandon – to keep their zips up and their buttons fastened...


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Wednesday, 2 December 2015

The ABCs of Death 2 (2015) DVD Review


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Amongst the recent upswing in anthology horror movies, we've had three V/H/S flicks (so far), and now we've got The ABCs of Death 2, which returns to the '26 Directors, 26 Ways to Die' formula that produced such a varied – and often downright bizarre – series of short films, where crazed invention ruled above all else. Naturally, with such varied films (and filmmakers), the results are mixed – read on for a run-down of the Hits, Misses, and OK inbetweeners. N.B. This is my personal take: film viewing is subjective, and your mileage with The ABCs of Death 2 may vary.

A is for “Amateur” (E.L. Katz):
Kicking things off in a high energy, music video style, the first of twenty-six shorts details the exploits of an assassin – but the perfect hit turns out to be a far more difficult (not to mention grubbier and more painful) affair than intended. Featuring Andy Nyman (Severance), this is a darkly comic treat. HIT.


B is for “Badger” (Julian Barratt):
A found footage style entry set during the recording of a nature documentary called “Toland's World”, with The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt as a preening Attenborough wannabe. A nearby nuclear power station seems to have killed off the local badger population – or has it? Typically British in its understated humour, but the jump scare fails to startle … good gore, though. OK.

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Thursday, 5 November 2015

SS Experiment Camp (Sergio Garrone, 1976) DVD Review


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“All this happiness is frightening.” If Don Edmonds' Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS is the poster girl for Naziploitation, then Sergio Garrone's SS Experiment Camp (aka Captive Women II: Orgies of the Damned) is the poster boy, literally, one could argue. At the beginning of the 1980s, the United Kingdom was wrapped up in a moral panic: the notorious 'Video Nasties' era, which was spurned on by the grisly, shocking, and altogether lurid cover art that adorned the shelves of countless video rental shops. Self-appointed 'Moral Campaigners' – from crusty old busy bodies who saw no point in actually viewing the material they so vehemently opposed, to the entire political establishment – marched about in a blue rinse fury, which the majority of newspapers were only too willing to embolden. Splashed across front pages and evening news reports was the graphic box art of various exploitation flicks – including that of Garrone's decidedly trashy slice of grindhouse grot, which was banned in the UK from 1976 until 2005. If you're easily offended, then why on earth are you reading about a movie like this? However, if you're not consumed by a perpetual tide of offence-taking, and recognise that a movie is just a movie, then strap in for something nasty...


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Saturday, 3 October 2015

Anthropophagous (Joe D'Amato, 1980) DVD Review


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“It's not fear that tears you apart … it's him!” Formerly one of the most notorious 'Video Nasties' in the United Kingdom – where it was banned in 1984 at the height of the moral panic – Anthropophagous: The Beast, aka The Savage Island, is a flesh-devouring holiday in hell from Joe D'Amato (Love Goddess of the Cannibals, and the infamous Emmanuelle in America). However, even with it's grisly reputation, the film has some grander ideas at its core...


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Monday, 10 August 2015

Contamination (Luigi Cozzi, 1980) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“They invade your body … control your mind … blow you apart!” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon (the Director and Writer of 1979's Alien) must have been blushing like schoolgirls when Luigi (Starcrash) Cozzi's gut-busting spin on their 'haunted house in space' shocker exploded onto the exploitation scene. Taking a handful of iconic images from Scott's film – including the alien eggs and the chest-burster scene – Contamination dispenses with subtlety and goes for spectacular slow-mo splatter...


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Sunday, 12 July 2015

Ash vs Evil Dead – Comic-Con Trailer Analysis




Watch the Official Trailer HERE and the Comic-Con Panel HERE.

Ash is back, baby! The trailer for the ten-part horror/comedy series from Starz premiered at Comic-Con 2015 and it's whipped up a bit of a fan frenzy – so let's dig into some of the highlights.

Boy Done Good:
So where's Ash gone since we last saw him? Not very far, it seems – if anything he's gone in reverse – living in a trailer hitched to the same car he's always had (just think of the time and money Ash must have spent restoring it after the events of the third film!), and now he's not even working at S-Mart. Now he has – so I presume – slid down the retail ladder to 'Value Stop' where he's still a Stockboy, re-living past glories as he tells his co-worker Pablo of his prior adventures: “I was the only one to escape, but now the evil has found me.” At least he's got himself a new prosthetic hand – a bit more fitting to 21st Century life than that bulky steel contraption from the last movie … maybe whatever magic that made it function wore off? “You won't see that hand, but that's all I'll say,” teased Raimi in response to a fan question on the matter of Ash's substitute hand at the Comic-Con Panel.


“Ash, even in his prime, would be the wrong guy to save the world – now he's thirty years older and he has to save the world! I'm really worried for the world,” said Campbell of Ash's advancing years. “Crabby old man Ash.” Sam Raimi also noted some of Ash's continued (but loveable) foibles: that the character is “a heel, a coward, and a blow hard” but is also “a great monster hunter”. Still though, while he may be a bit down-at-heel (he's even revealed to be wearing dentures at one point – but could this just be a little joke only for the trailer?), Ash still knows how to wield a stump-mounted chainsaw – a moment in the trailer that pushed all the right buttons!

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Saturday, 11 July 2015

The Walking Dead Season 6 Comic-Con Trailer Analysis

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“We both started out in the same place … you can come back from this, I know you can” says Rick, but who is he talking to? Is it Morgan? It likely is, but what could Rick be referring to? Has Morgan done something terribly wrong between when we last saw him in Season 3 and now? “Good people, they always die – I'm a killer, Rick, and you are too,” responds Morgan, supporting Rick's view that you shouldn't take chances – but does this have a loaded meaning? Is Morgan unsure of Rick's intentions – his sanity, even – after the close of Season 5 which saw Rick kill an enraged and beaten Pete right in front of Morgan?


“You get out of here and you don't ever come back,” says Morgan in another part of the trailer, at which point we cut to Rick. Clearly the folks behind The Walking Dead want to give us an idea of Morgan and Rick being potential enemies in Season 6, or at the very least two sides of a contentious argument. The editors of these trailers are notoriously tricksy, and when you look closely you see numerous instances where two different scenes have been stitched together to seemingly form one scene. There will surely be a clash between the two men – but will it be quite as angry as the trailer suggests? Could it even be a double bluff?

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Friday, 3 July 2015

Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“Guaranteed! The 8 greatest shocks ever filmed!” Mario Bava (A Bay Of Blood) established the basic thematic template of the Italian giallo film with the Hitchcock-influenced The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963 before laying out – in full-bodied colour – the visual essence of what would become an iconic movement in Italian cinema. Vibrant splashes of pink and blue, red and green, filled the off-kilter frame as the camera glided through shadowy corridors. Bava, a former lighting cameraman, also made full use of the frame in all dimensions, with action frequently taking place throughout the entirety of his meticulous compositions – side-to-side, top-to-bottom, front-to-back. Excess, violence, and sex are common visual and narrative themes in gialli, and here in Blood and Black Lace – essentially the second ever giallo film – Bava unleashed a beast...


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Sunday, 14 June 2015

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (Sergio Martino, 1971) DVD Review


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“You know I'm dying to see you.” Sergio Martino – one of Italy's finest journeymen filmmakers – helmed an impressive run of giallo films during the early 1970s. Following on from the sublime The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1970) came The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, a densely-plotted thriller/morality play packed with infidelity and greed – as well as a some particularly flashy murder sequences...


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Monday, 1 June 2015

The Washing Machine (Ruggero Deodato, 1993) DVD Review


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“A man, cut up into pieces, and stuffed in there like soiled linen.” Ruggero Deodato – a name synonymous with one film in particular: the utterly notorious Cannibal Holocaust – but what of some of the other highlights from his varied career? His name has also been attached to the likes of House on the Edge of the Park (a spin on The Last House on the Left) and Phantom of Death (Basil Exposition ages disgracefully) … but, like most Italian directors, he also lent his talents to the world of the giallo film. However, in the case of the curiously-titled The Washing Machine (aka Vortice Mortale), the sultry sex appeal of the 1970s had long gone and, in this case, been replaced by a post-Cold War hangover and pastel track suits...


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