David Slade, director of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night, stepped into the chair to direct the third Twilight movie, which was going to be a blockbuster just by the force of its fans. One major change would be that the film’s main enemy vampire Victoria would be played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Victoria starts the movie by attacking a young man named Riley Biers (Xavier Samuel) as part of her goal of making an army of newborn vampires to get her revenge on Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) for killing her true love. sa for Edward and Bella (Kristen Stewart), they’re still going back and forth over turning her and getting married. As for her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), he forcibly kisses Bella as he’s in love with her.

Anyways…

Alice (Ashley Greene) has a psychic flashforward of the newborn army attacking the Cullens, which calls for a truce between the vampires and Lycans. Bella also learns that mated vampire pairs experience stronger love than normal humans — again, if you think this entire story doesn’t have major BDSM themes, I’ll let you whip me — so she agrees to marry Edward. She’s also fallen in love with Jacob but it’s not a love as strong as the one she has with Edward.

In the battle with the vicious baby — well, newborn — vampires, Victoria is finally killed by Edward and Riley is killed by Seth. Then, the Volturi arrive and find the Cullens guarding a newborn vampire by the name of Bree Tanner (Jodelle Ferland). Despite the fact that she surrendered, Jane (Dakota Fanning) tells Felix (Daniel Cudmore) to kill her. She also remarks that Bella is still human, but Bella informs her that she plans to get married, have sex and then become a vampire.

Her dad is really going to be the last to know.

This installment of Twilight only serves to set us up for the wild lunacy of the final two movies. Get ready.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: Eclipse has extras, like two commentary tracks (Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart on one, Stephenie Meyer and Wyck Godfrey the alternate), a part of the six-part making-of doc, extended scenes, cast interviews, music videos for Muse’s “Neutron Star Collision” and Metric’s “Eclipse (All Yours)” and so much more. Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.

Thomas the Possessed (or Thomas and the Bewitched, I have seen both translations) is from director Pupi Averti, who wrote it with his brother Antonio and Giorgio Celli. It was his second film, one he said that was cursed by family issues and money issues.

A new theater company — Edmund Purdom is one of the actors — is about to put on its first performance, the story of a child named Thomas who a woman believes that she has given birth to but who does not exist. They’re met by a man who offers to read the fortune of the play. At that seance, they are introduced to Thomas, who has become a real person.

On the way to the town where they will perform, they meet an actor hanging from a tree who claims to be the only survivor of a performance gone wrong, one that ended with the audience murdering all of the actors except for him. This must have happened, as the audience is already attacking the stage before the first scene. This is after they rode a ghost train to the town, so at this point, anything could happen.

From a cemetery with bottles instead of graves, the sexual revolution and a hospice home where the elderly die rapidly, Thomas the Possessed is one strange movie, yet we should accept no less from its director. If it all ends where it begins, we must accept this.

After this failed to find an audience, it would take Averti five years to make his next film, La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone. A year later, he would make Bordella and the movie he may be best known for, The House With the Laughing Windows. He’s still directing movies today.

For some time, the only way to see this was to rent the copy in the Bologna library, which Averti himself donated. Its production company went out of business and the movie had only played the 1970 film festival in Locarno.

You can watch this film on YouTube.

Shot in the same time period as Le amanti del mostro — which is also directed by Sergio Garrone —  The Hand That Feeds the Dead combines the ideas of Frankenstein with one of my favorite plots, the intelligent doctor driven to mad things because of love. Also see: Eyes Without a Face, Faceless, Corruption, Mansion of the Doomed and Atom Age Vampire.

Professor Nijinski (Klaus Kinski) was working on skin grafts when a fire in his lab burned the face of his wife Tania (Katia Christine). This inferno also claims the life of the professor’s mentor — and Tania’s father — Doctor Baron Ivan Rassimov and that name has to be a joke, right?

While the mad scientist is using his hunchback assistant Vanya (Erol Taş) to kill women in the village and then use their skin in super gory — thanks Carlo Rambaldi! — surgical scenes that blew my mind. I mean, there are tubes everywhere, small balls filled with blood and machinery that is needlessly — and therefore, totally awesome — complicated.

Also staying in the decaying mansion is Sonia (Stella Calderoni), newlyweds Masha and Alex (Katia Christine and Ayhan Isik) and Katja (Marzia Damon), who is looking for her missing sister. Somehow, in the midst of this surgical gore freakout, there’s also an extended lesbian makeout, which may not make sense until you realize that Garrone also made SS Experiment Camp and the most horror-filled Italian Western there has ever been, Django the Bastard.

This was produced by Turkish Şakir V. Sözen, who cast Ayhan Işık and provided the villa in Istanbul where it was filmed. It was not released in Turkey until 1986 after actor and producer Yilmaz Duru bought it from Sözen and released it as Ölümün Nefesi (Bread of Death).

I absolutely went wild for this movie. Yes, it’s not the greatest Italian horror movie ever, but man, those surgical scenes look great even today when it comes to practical special effects. As always, I also love seeing Kinski and waiting for him to get worked up.

Kids scare the living shit out of me.

When I was young, my neighbor used to have her grandchildren visit over the holidays and we always had to play with them. One of them was very young and while sled riding, he lost his tiger. I thought that it was a stuffed one but after we walked the entire neighborhood, he told me it was invisible.

But what if it were real?

Directed by Marcello Aliprandi and written by Nicolò and Maria Teresa Rienzi, A Whisper In the Dark comes out of movies like Don’t Look Now, Who Saw Her Die? and The Haunting of Julia.

This is about a family who have fractured dynamics to say the least. Alex (John Phillip Law) is sleeping with everyone but his wife Camille (Nathalie Delon). The twins, Milena (Susanna Melandri) and Mathilde (Simona Patitucci) are horrible to their sensitive brother Martino (Alessandro Poggi). Alex’s mother (Zora Velcova) only makes everyone more on edge and the governess Françoise (Olga Bisera, The Spy Who Loved Me) trying to keep it all together. There’s also a visit from America, Susan (Lucretia Love, Enter the Devil) who is in the house seemingly only to be nude in a few moments.

There’s also Luca, who is either Martino’s imaginary friend or the ghost of Camila’s miscarriage. Only Martino can see him and a famous psychologist (Joseph Cotten) is determined to learn if this is a mental or supernatural problem.

This movie feels at times like it’s from another dimension, such as the scene where the children throw confetti in the air as a boat with a wicker man is set on fire in the lake. As snow and fog roll in, Camille is chased through their grounds by Luca and she decides that she must finally keep her family safe from her lost son. She can no longer keep him and she sends him away from her with the camera moving upward. Her husband finds her in tears and they finally come back together to make love.

The next day, everything has moved back into the routine of family as finally, all of the busy people run away from the breakfast table, leaving Camille alone.

I really enjoyed this, as it’s so different from what you expect, a slow and sad rumination over family life and loss that may or may not be fantastic in nature. You can watch it from either the thought that everyone is mad or that Luca exists.

The Pino Donaggio score is great, too. He also shows up as a singer at the children’s ball.

Erna Schürer (Scream of the Demon Lover) is Elizabeth Ball Janon, who has gone back to her family’s castle — along with her not-to-be-trusted boyfriend  Jack Seaton (Roland Carey) and their friends Gerard (Giorgio Gennari) and Blanche (Beverly Fuller) — to claim her inheritance.

The only movie from director and writer Ferruccio Casapinta, this finds everyone in the castle battling over what Elizabeth should do with the place. Her uncle’s secretary Carol (Lucia Bomez) says that’s what he wanted while his lawyer Mr. Shinton (Domenico Ravenna) says the opposite. Then there’s Paul Reynauld (Ettore Ribotta) and Claudine (Aurora Batista), who claim that Elizabeth’s uncle had already sold the castle to them.

It all seems like something out of safe detective fiction until that evening when Elizabeth goes to bed and starts having wet dreams about Jack being taken over by a ghost and treating her to some BDSM in the basement, all while Carol stops being the librarian type and gets taken by a secret lover. And would someone get that dog to stop barking?

This was probably directed by cinematographer Francesco Attenni. A lot of it is basic by-the-numbers detective giallo fiction pre-Argento, but man, there’s also a moment where a Satanic gang lashes Elizabeth to a giant cross and then rips her dress off and she seemingly crosses that line from afraid to aroused. We wouldn’t have the poster art without this scene and while I wish that the rest of the film kept this demented and debauched feel, you can’t have peaks without valleys.

Frankenstein all’italiana – Prendimi, straziami, che brucio de passion! (Frankenstein Italian Style – Take Me, Torture Me, as I am Burning with Passion!) has Dr. Frankenstein (Gianrico Tedeschi) getting married to the beautiful Janet (Jenny Tamburi, Smile Before Death, The Psychic). The problem? His creature (Aldo Maccione) is still walking around and attacks the wedding. He breaks into pieces and the doctor decides to make a new creature who soon falls for Janet. And when he tries to get Igor (Ninetto Davoli) to watch her, his assistant also becomes sexually attracted to her.

This was the eighth and final theatrical movie by Armando Crispino, who made dark movies like Autopsy and The Dead Are Alive, which give no hint to the fact that he was going to do a horror comedy. It was written by Massimo Franciosa and Luisa Montagnana (Spasmo).

Also: The Creature has a giant penis. My people, the Italians, seem fascinated by this thought, as it also appears in the more berserk Frankenstein 80. 

Chris Weitz came on board for this film and he’s had an interesting career. He’s the son of Susan Kohner from Imitation of Life and novelist and clothing designer John Weitz. He and his brother Paul directed American Pie and About a Boy before he had a horrible experience directing The Golden Compass, leaving the film due to the pressure and coming back when Anand Tucker left. New Line was horrible to deal with. He said, “It was a terrible experience because I was able to shoot what I wanted to — and then the cut of the movie was taken away from me and any reference to religion or religious ideas was removed.”

Since directing this movie, he’s written Disney’s live action Cinderella, The Creator and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

On Bella Swan’s (Kristen Stewart) eighteenth birthday, she has a dream that she is an old woman and her boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) is still young. She goes to see his family for her birthday and is nearly killed by his brother Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) when she gets a paper cut. Yes, this happens. This also causes their breakup and the Cullens to leave behind the small town of Forks.

It takes a long time to get over the depression for Bella, but one day, she goes to the movies with her friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick). After some bikers scare everyone, she realizes that she likes the rough stuff and misses Edward. The fact that The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by E.L. James episodically on fan websites under the pen name “Snowqueen Icedragon” is not lost on me.

She starts hanging out with Jacob (Taylor Lautner) until he becomes part of the wolf pack and cuts all his hair off. Now he has a tattoo and just spends time following Sam Uley (Chaske Spencer), the Alpha. This may start reminding you of a David DeCoteau movie.

There’s still Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre) and Laurent (Edi Gathegi) looking for revenge and soon, we learn what Sam and Jacob can do as they transform into wolves and destroy Laurent. Victoria barely escapes as Bella is kept safe. That said, Alice (Ashley Greene), the precognitive vampire, sees a vision where Bella jumps off a cliff, so Edward decides to go to Rome and ask to be killed by the Volturi, the council of vampires. Alice finds that Bella is alive and they save Edward just in time, but now the Volturi want to kill Bella for knowing that vampires exist. She offers her life for Edward’s and they agree that maybe she should be a vampire someday. She agrees and asks the Cullens and they like the idea except that Edward says, “Well, we’d have to be married” because he’s not giving up the vampire without a ring. She says that she’ll consider it and whew. New Moon everyone.

At this point in the story, the Cullens are the young X-Men, Jacob and his people are like the stuff you see on hunting shirts at Wal-Mart and the Volturi are the goth kids who make their own clothes and stand in front of Hot Topic and scare the kids who just want to buy a My Chemical Romance Funko Pop. All of these references are dated but this movie was made in 2009, so there you go.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: New Moon has extras such as a commentary track from director Chris Weitz and editor Peter Lambert, a part of the six-part making-of doc, extended scenes, cast interviews, a red carpet video and so much more. Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.

The 10th Victim. We Still Kill the Old Way. Property Is No Longer a Theft. Todo Modo. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Elio Petri made movies that challenged viewers and sadly, he died at 53, an age well too young and one that should have left many years to continue pushing cinema.

Based on The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions — where do you think the soundtrack team got their name? — A Quiet Place In the Country stands between and yet above so many genre. Is it giallo? Gothic horror? An art film? Comic book trash, as The Boston Globe wrote? Can it be all of those?

Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) hasn’t been able to paint for a long time. His girlfriend Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) keeps pushing him to get back to painting so she can sell his work at her gallery. She rents him a mansion out in the countryside, but he feels lost. Then he notices an abandoned property and moves in, a place once taken care of by Attilio (Georges Géret). He hires a housekeeper, Egle (Rita Calderoni in her first world, not yet entering the psychosexual world of Renato Polselli’s films) and begins to make the place new again.

Yet there are noises everywhere and strange feelings. A shopkeeper tells him that a girl, Wanda (Gabriella Boccardo), died there during World War II, shot by a plane. He keeps seeing a man leave flowers on his property every day. Flavia leaves when the house itself seems to attack her, as a hole opens under her feet and a bookshelf nearly falls on her.

Without her, Leonardo becomes obsessed with Wanda, learning how every man in town was in love with her and every woman hated her. Was she a nymphomanic using everyone? Was she looking for love that she didn’t have anywhere else? Was she using everyone or were they using her? He finally tracks down her mother (Madeleine Damien) to Venice where she lives in a small apartment. Telling her that he’s a journalist, he takes photos of her back to the house.

The person leaving the flowers ends up being Attillo. He tells her that he never cared that she loved anyone else, that they had a secret room where her mother watched them make love through a mirror, that the only time he ever grew jealous was when he watched her be mounted by a German soldier who he killed. She helped him bury the body on that day, the same one she died in the air strike.

Flavia comes back and learns that Leonardo has given up on everything. Even his attempts at romance are too rough and between an electric current that strikes her and being strangled by unseen fingers during a seance, she knows she can no longer stay. As the guests department, Leonardo follows her, stabbing her before tearing her to pieces with a shovel. He also attacks his maid and her boyfriend, using them as part of his art before his mind goes a series of visions in which soldiers force people to paint on the grounds and Atillo reveals that Wanda survived the air attack and he was the one who killed her. As the police come to arrest him, he realizes that Flavia stands in the crowd with the onlookers.

Months — or years? — later, he is confined to a mental institution. All he does is work, finally being able to paint sexualized artwork, living off pornography and chocolate. The orderly takes his work, telling him he needs even more and delivers them to Flavia, who hides from his window. She remarks that she wishes that she had his life, as it looks so relaxing.

This movie made me cry more than once and sometimes from joy and other times from the abject nature of my sadness. Perhaps also the Ennio Morricone score. It’s emotional when a movie works so well, when you realize that this is the only first-time watch that you will ever get. And it strikes a nerve that Franco is looking for someone who was never there, a woman who is perfect because he only sees her in his mind, but every man, even the ones who touched her before, cannot forget her, as her ghost — memories and not supernatural, mind you — will remain burning hot in their memories as they settle for their wives and lives. Is Franco’s character any different than them? Is Flavia not attacked at all by the supernatural but perhaps the one who engineered all of this, a non-horror ending that turns this into the giallo? Did anyone die? Did anyone live?

Giorgio (Renato Pozzetto, My Wife Is a Witch) has to move from Milan to Rome. In order to convince his girlfriend Candida (Gloria Guida, Blues Jeans) to come with him, he promises to find the perfect house for them — and by them, I mean her mother (Lia Zoppelli) is part of the plans — and he finds a mansion for a price that seems too good to be true.

Guida also appears in the prologue, in which she’s another Candida, who has been cursed by her witch of a mother (also Zoppelli) to marry the evil Ali Amman instead of her true love Giorgiafat (also Pozzetto). The witch turns teh young lovers into salt statues and forces their souls to wander for a thousand years and a thousand years more if Candida remains a virgin. Now, they have been reincarnated as…guess who.

There are all manner of poltergeists in this giant house out to keep Giorgio and Guida from making love, including his dog Gaetano, which somehow gets a Southern accent. It even has a scene where Giogio transforms into The Hulk.

This was directed and written — along with Mario Amendola,  Mario Cecchi Gori, Giovanni Manganelli and Enrico Oldoini — by Bruno Corbucci. Yes, the same man who made The Great Silence, one of the most depressing Westerns of all time. Look for him in a cameo as Gateano’s vet.

At the end of World War II, Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais) sacrificed his daughter instead of allowing her to live her life under the family curse. That curse? Each first born daughter must become a succubus. Somehow, even though he was a general during the war, he isn’t charged with war crimes — or you know, murder — and his castle is famous enough that it brings a reporter who starts taking photos. He tells her not to, as he lives a hidden life, but she does anyway and is hit with a bolt of lightning out of nowhere that leaves the mark of the devil on her. And oh yeah, she’s dead now.

Welcome to The Devil’s Nightmare, which is also called La plus longue nuit du diable (The Devil’s Longest Night) and La terrificante notte del demonio (The Terrifying Night of the Demon). It also has the titles The Devil Walks at Midnight, Succubus, Vampire Playgirls, Satan’s Playthings and Castle of Death. It played U.S. triple bills with In the Devil’s Garden and The Devil’s Wedding Night.

A group of seven tourists — Matt, Nancy, Howard, Corinne, Regine, Mr. Mason and Alvin — are stranded when a flood takes out a bridge. Satan himself — well, they don’t know it yet — directs them to the Baron’s castle, where his servant Hans (Maurice De Groote) gets them rooms for the evening and informs his master that he has guests. The Baron is in the middle of doing some alchemy but still has time for dinner, during which he explains his family curse. When asked if he has a daughter, he answers to the contrary.

Meanwhile, Lisa Muller (Erika Blanc) is another guest and she goes about killing each of the other guests following the rules of the seven deadly sins. Only Alvin, a seminary student, survives her murderous ways. He asks Satan if he can save the souls of everyone else by giving up his own. The devil agrees and everyone is back alive.

The next morning, the Baron reveals to Alvin that he killed his daughter when she was a baby, but the joke is on him. The housekeeper Martha reveals that her daughter is Lisa and that her father is the Baron’s brother, making her the first-born woman of this generation of the von Rhoneberg family. Alvin refuses to believe that Lisa could be a demon and stays with her at the castle as the rest of the group drives off, soon run off the road by a hearse driven by Satan, dooming everyone all over again and getting Alvin’s soul too. He and Lisa smile at each other.

You can read my past review of this that was posted when Mondo Macabro released it and Jenn Upton’s article on the movie as well.