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.

Balsamus the Man of Satan was directed by Pupi Avati and nearly the entire cast and crew were close friends of his, including writers Enzo Leonardo and Giorgio Celli. It stars Ariano Nanetti (Bob Tonelli) is the dwarf of the title. He was an entrepreneur who had a man named Mister X — businessman Carmine Domenico Rizzo — who paid for most of the movie. It’s the director’s first movie and if you want to watch some of the better films that he would do, I would say The House With the Laughing Windows and Zeder are two solid ones.

Balsamus is a magician who says that he can solve human and animal sterility and who has been gathering several rich women around himself. Meanwhile, his wife Lorenza is sleeping with his assistant Alliata and his servant Ottavio does all of the work. He kills his mother-in-law and resurrects her, but when he tries to add to his magical powers, he fails. Depressed, he calls out all of his wife’s affairs and kills himself. The court mocks him other than the faithful Ottavio.

Based on Giuseppe Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, a famous alchemist and necromancer. Avati said, “I was fascinated by readings on paranormal and alchemical themes, furthermore in the film there was a rural matrix, my rural life in Sasso Marconi. I wanted to write Cagliostro’s life, in grotesque terms, setting it in the present day.” 

Yet much like its protagonist, this all ended up as a movie that others didn’t understand. “I had a lot of hope in Balsamus, I hoped to be appreciated by who knows what critics, but in reality it was a resounding defeat,” concluded Avati. He also claimed that the movie would have been a bigger disaster if not for the assistance of director of photography Franco Delli Colli, who was on camera for Leone’s Duck, You Sucker! and lit Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! as well as being the cinematographer for plenty of great movies like Ghosthouse, Rats: Night of Terror, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Avati’s Zeder. 

This was released in other countries as Blood Relations and The Man of Satan.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Lycanthropus was directed by Paolo Heusch (The Day the Sky Exploded) and written by Ernesto Gastaldi. Heusch used the name Richard Benson, as all Italian directors of that time had to have an American names.

If the title Werewolf In a Girls’ Dormitory isn’t good enough — and it is, it’s one of the best exploitation titles ever — it was also released as I Married a Werewolf, Ghoul in a Girl’s Dormitory, Monster Among the Girls and The Ghoul In School, which is the name of the song that Marilyn Stewart and Frank Owens wrote and that was sung by Adam Keefe. In case you wonder why a voice that sounds like Peter Lorre says, “Come with me to the corridors of blood,” that’s because this movie was on a double feature with Corridors of Blood. 

Director Swift (Curt Lowens) is trying to run a reform school that’s funded by Sir Alfred Whiteman (Maurice Marsac). Swift brings on a new teacher named Julian Olcott (Carl Schell, the brother of Maximilian) even though he’s aware of the fact that when Olcott was a doctor, some patients died.

One of the girls, Mary Smith (Mary McNeeran), is sleeping with Whiteman and also blackmailing him. She’s the first to die — shocking that the bad girl of all these reform girls is the first to die and that she’s also sleeping with the rich man paying for all of the school — and the police decide that she was killed by wolves. Priscilla (Barbara Lass, Roman Polanski’s first wife) believes that someone else did it, as she finds a note that was threatening Mary. Like a giallo main character, she ends up investigating the case herself with the help of the school’s handyman Walter (Luciano Pigozzi) and Whiteman. She soon learns that his wife Sheena (Annie Steinert) knows who killed the girl ruining her marriage but she won’t reveal the truth.

As you can tell by the title, there is a werewolf. It gets there and yes, it’s amazing when it happens. This movie looks so much better than you’d expect with its title. It’s also the only werewolf movie I’ve ever seen where the girls attacked by the monster have orgasms while in the jaws of the furry creature.

Want to see what Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum thinks? Check out what he has to say here.

You can get this from Severin.

Stephanie Morgan attended Brigham Young University — her Mormon faith informs her writing — before marrying at the age of twenty-one and graduating with a degree in English. Having no prior experience as an author, she got the idea for the Twilight books in a dream. Despite it being her first book, there were multiple companies vying to publish it. It took a month for her to be on the New York Times best seller list and four years later, Twilight was one of the most challenged books according to the American Library Association because of its sexuality and religious content.

As one of the first writers to use social media to connect with her readers. The books have sold over 100 million copies and it was optioned for a movie before the book was published.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) and written by Melissa Rosenberg, the movie begins when teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) leaves Phoenix for Forks, a small town in Washington to live with her cop dad Charlie (Billy Burke) after her mom Renée (Sarah Clarke) gets married to a minor league pitcher named Phil (Matt Bushell). She doesn’t want to be in this small town but does remember her childhood friend Jacob Black (Tyler Lauter) who lives on the Quileute Indian Reservation.

Once she’s in school, she becomes obsessed with the rich Cullen family, including Edward (Robert Pattinson), a 108-year-old vampire who looks the same age as her. He has an entire family of adopted siblings who are all taught by their father figure, Carlisle (Peter Facinelli). If it feels like the X-Men, I have plenty to say about that. The family also includes mother Esme (Elizabeth Reaser), precognitive Alice (Ashley Greene), super strong Emmett (Kellan Lutz) and his mate Rosalie Hale (Nikki Reed) and emotion manipulator Jasper Haale (Jackson Rathbone).

What follows — and stay tuned through all of these movies — is a love/hate/I can’t be with you/I can’t be without you relationship between Bella and Edward with Jacob always on the side, trying to escape being a friend.

There’s also another clan of vampires led by Victoria Sutherland (Rachelle Lefevre) and James Witherdale (Cam Gigandet) who want to kill Bella. Along with Laurent (Edi Gathegi), they start killing people in Forks. Eventually, Edward kills James and takes Bella to the prom, where Victoria is waiting for revenge. And oh man, I almost forgot Anna Kendrick is in this!

Twilight is a big dumb movie and I don’t say that in a mean way. It’s not a Universal vampire movie, it’s not Hammer, it’s not even Jess Franco or Jean Rollin. It’s vampires for older teens who want some level of safe erotic excitement as they move from girl to woman. Now, the fact that the vampire is 118 and the girl is 17, well, that is troublesome. The Native American appropriation is as well. But I can’t lie that I wasn’t entertained by these movies, even if I yelled at the screen like a lunatic for the entire film.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight has extras such as a tour featurette; an interview with creator Stephenie Meyer; features on the cast, music and kiss scene; Catherine Hardwicke’s “Bella’s Lullaby Remix” music video; the red carpet from the movie’s premiere and more. It’s an amazing package that you can get exclusively from Best Buy.