The poster for this movie states, “Every once in a while, a horror film becomes a horror classic. In 1931, Frankenstein. In 1932, Dracula. In 1968, Rosemary’s Baby. In 1974, The Exorcist. This year it is…From Beyond the Grave…where death is just the beginning!” Man, talk about hyperbole! Sure, this Amicus portmanteau is good, but it went right for the balls there, right?

17 years before Stephen King wrote Needful Things, this movie presents Temptations Limited, an antique store with the motto “Offers You Cannot Resist” and a frightening owner played by Peter Cushing.

In the Gatecrasher, Edward Charlton (David Warner!) thinks he’s conned Cushing into selling him a mirror for an incredibly inexpensive price. The thing is, that mirror is haunted by a ghost that feeds on murder and suicide. And the cycle of the mirror may go on and on, as we soon learn.

The second story, An Act of Kindness, is all about Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen), a man trapped in a loveless marriage (Diana Dors, who plays his wife, has one hell of a real-life story that you can learn about in our review of one of her other movies, Craze). He feels no love from her or their son, so he stays out late and avoids going home.

Soon, he’s met an old soldier barely scraping by played by Donald Pleasence. He tells the old man that he was a soldier and purchases a Distinguished Service Order medal from Cushing to back up his yarns. Before you know it, he’s been seduced by the man’s daughter (who is plated by Pleasence’s real-life daughter Angela), who uses magic to kill his wife and set up a marriage between them. However, things can only get worse for Lowe.

In The Elemental, a demon inside a snuff box haunts a man, his dog and his wife.

Finally, in The Door, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy, Witchfinder General) wants a fancy door from the shop but can’t afford it. Cushing offers him a deal and soon, it’s in his house and creating a gateway to a mysterious blue room where evil occultist Sir Michael Sinclair menaces our hero and his wife (Lesley-Anne Down, Death Wish 5: The Face of Death). This is the best of the bunch, with a genuinely creepy feel and a horrifying villain. It’s also the only story that ends well for its protagonists.

After all that, Cushing deals with a thief in his shop by locking him into an iron maiden and speaking directly to the viewer. All Amicus movies must end this way, which was probably some kind of British law.

This is the last of the Amicus portmanteau films and while not as powerful or frightening as their earlier efforts, it’s still plenty of frightening fun.

The assistant director of Johnny Got His Gun, as well as the director of Big Bad Mama, Lone Wolf McQuaid and Eye for an Eye, Steve Carver directed this exploitation roughie, where slave girls become gladiators and rise against their masters. But hey — it has Pam Grier in it! And you know why it’s probably so sleazy? I blame the director of cinematography — Joe D’Amato!

In the time after Spartacus, in the ancient Roman town of Brundusium, a group of slave girls are sold to Timarchus (Daniele Vargas, Eyeball), a promoter who puts together the fights in the colosseum. After the girls engage in a fight, she gets a big idea: make them fight to the death.

That’s when Mamawi (Pam Grier) and Bodicia (Margaret Markov) — who had just teamed up in Black Mama, White Mama — decide to team up and get out alive. Rosalba Neri (Lady Frankenstein herself!, as well as Lucifera: Demon Lover and Amuck!) is in this too!

Markov met her husband, producer Mark Damon, while making this movie, but couldn’t date until production was over, as director Steve Carver had made a rule regarding cast and crew intermingling.

Your enjoyment of this will depend on how much you enjoy watching women battle as gladiators and get treated as slaves. Go in wisely, dear reader.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a movie. It is a force of nature. Where Night of the Living Dead took 1960’s horror past giant monsters and gothic monsters into modern concerns within the conceit of zombies. This film doesn’t need to exist within the supernatural. In fact, it’s so outside the realm of the unreal that so many people think it’s based on a real story. Or even is a real film, years before movies like The Blair Witch Project tried to pull stunts like that.

The real stunt of this movie is that it was made in the first place. Filmed in an early 1900s farmhouse in Round Rock, Texas on a small budget, the crew shot the film seven days a week, 16 hours a day, with temperatures that reached 110° F. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, was really a poet. A poet wearing a dead skin mask for 16 hours a day for over twenty-five days straight. 

The house was filled with real animal remains, animal blood from a local slaughterhouse and furniture made from animal bones. As you can imagine, keeping all these dead things trapped within a poorly ventilated house led to conditions which were anything but fair to the actors.

Director Tobe Hooper envisioned this film as a PG related film, so he made each cut work so that you never see any of the actual carnage. But it backfired — as a result, the film’s entire feel is one of brutality. It’s actually hard to watch unless you properly prepare yourself for it.

“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular, Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin.” That opening dialogue, by future sitcom actor John Larroquette for the price of a joint, suggests that the film you are about to watch is true. While it has some basis in the stories of Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley, there never really was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was invented by Hooper and writer Kim Henkel. Yet there’s always someone willing to convince you that there was.

It’s actually a pretty simple film. A vanful of hippies comes face to face with a cannibal clan who are being forced out of their way of life by industrialized improvements to the meat processing industry. Despite their astrology, peace and love, they are utterly annihilated and even the strongest of them is driven insane by the end.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film that ignores the rules of the hero’s journey and characters needing to undergo some personal growth. Everyone is lucky if they survive and even the villains and heroes that do won’t make it for long. Modern highways will push their way into the backwoods. Police procedures will improve. And the only work this clan will have is just trying to keep their way of life alive.

You can see the bloody influence of this film on nearly every horror film that came in its wake. Hell, Rob Zombie has made an entire career out of trying to remake something a tenth this good. This is a film that oozes malevolence and ill will from the very moment it begins to play.

I’m always struck by the fact that hardly anyone involved ever made their money back. The film’s original distributor was Bryanston Distribution Company, which turned out to be a Mafia front operated by Louis “Butchie” Peraino, who used Chainsaw to launder money that he had made from Deep Throat. The investors did make their money back, but the crew only made $405 each, scant pay for the hell on Earth they went through (Edwin Neal, the Hitchhiker, claimed that this film was more miserable than being in Vietnam and he’d wanted to kill Hooper for some time). After an arrest for obscenity, the cast and crew filed suit against Peraino and were awarded $25,000 each, which came from new owners New Line Cinema.

There’s a sequel to this film which exists in its own universe. I love that it’s everything that this movie isn’t. It’s a middle finger to expectations and ends with a final shot that is at least the equal of this film.

You can watch this on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

New York City in 1974 must have felt like the end of the world. Based on the 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, Death Wish was the answer. In fact, in many theaters, the audience stood up and cheered as Paul Kersey got his bloody revenge for the crims visited upon him and his family.

The film we’re about to discuss went through many twists and turns as it made its way to the screen. Originally, it ended with the vigilante hero confronting the thugs who attacked his family and them killing him, police detective Ochoa discovering his weapon and deciding to follow in his footsteps. And get this — the first choice to play the lead was Jack Lemmon, with Henry Fonda as Ochoa and Sidney Lumet directing.

Finally, United Artists picked the gritty action veteran Michael Winner to direct. Several studios rejected the film due to its subject matter and the difficulty of casting the lead. Winner wanted Bronson, who he’d worked with in the past, but the actor’s agent hated the message of the film and Bronson felt that the book was about a weak man, someone he would not be playing on film.

Death Wish turned Bronson, who was 53 at the time of its release, into a major star known worldwide. It’s a movie made exactly for its time. Despite its lurid subject matter and dangerous acceptance of its hero’s actions, it’s still a great exploitation film that actually explores the why behind its hero’s actions instead of just setting him loose upon people.

Paul Kersey (Bronson) starts the movie in Hawaii with his wife Joanna. When they return home to the squalid streets of New York City, it’s only days before three thugs — including Jeff Goldblum! — invade their apartment, raping their daughter Carol and bearing Joanna so badly that she dies.  Beyond Goldblum in this early role, keep an eye open for Christopher Guest and Olympia Dukakis as cops, as well as Sonia Manzano (Maria from Sesame Street, who was dating director Winner at the time and suggested that Herbie Hancock do the score) and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington from TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter) in supporting roles.

As he recovers from his wife’s death, Paul is mugged. He fights back and chases off his attacker and finds new strength from the battle. An architect by trade, Paul heads to Tucson where he helps Ames Jainchill with his residential development project. After work one night, he goes to a gun club with Ames, where we learn how good of a shot Paul is. Turns out he was a conscientious objector and combat medic who was taught marksmanship by his father, but promised his mother he’d never pick up another gun after his dad was killed in a hunting accident. On the way back home, Paul discovers that Ames has given him a gun as a gift.

Now back home, Paul learns from his son-in-law that his daughter is still catatonic and would be better off in a mental hospital. That night, when walking, Paul is mugged again but he has the gun with him. He fights back and kills the mugger, but even that action causes him to grow physically sick. But soon, he’s prowling the mean streets and looking for a fight.

Before long, NYPD detective Lt. Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) begins investigating the vigilante killings and quickly narrows down his suspect list to Paul. As the manhunt gets closer and closer, Paul finally is caught after passing out from blood loss after a shootout. Instead of arresting him, the NYPD wants the case quietly solved, so they send him off to Chicago. The minute he arrives, he helps a woman who was almost mugged and stares at the criminals with a smile, his fingers in the shape of a gun.

There’s a story which may be apocryphal, but when Michael Winner told Bronson what this film would be about — a man who goes out and shoots muggers — Bronson replied, “I’d like to do that.” Winner said, “The film?” And Bronson replied, “No. Shoot muggers.”

After viewing the film, author Brian Garfield hated how the film advocated vigilantism, so he wrote a sequel called Death Sentence that was made into a movie in 2007 starring Kevin Bacon. No word on whether or not he hated that movie too, as it only keeps a little of the book.

Compared to the heights of mayhem that this series will descend to, this is a retrained meditation of a man facing an increasingly violent world. Stay tuned. Paul Kersey is just getting started.

Thanks to his work on Amicus films, Freddie Francis will always get a pass. And Jack Palance has made some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen so much better. Therefore, I wanted to like Craze way more than I ended up enjoying it.

Palance stars as antique shop owner by day, cultist by night Neal Mottram. The film starts with him sacrificing a nude woman to the African god Chuku, whom he believes will reward him with both wealth and power. Its movies like this that make being a devil worshipper seem rough and pointless. Every single turn, you have to hunt someone down, kill them, get an alibi and run from the cops. It’s a lot of work and when it’s over, you still lose your soul.

Diana Dors is in it and her life story is way more interesting than the film. She gained her first fame as a Monroe-esque blonde bombshell promoted by her first husband, Dennis Hamilton. After a career of sex comedies and Page 3-style modeling, it turned out that her husband was defrauding her. Still after that, she made further headlines by holding parties where she supplied hot young starlets and plenty of drugs to a large number of celebrities. The real stinger was that she had cameras all over the house to capture the action. The Archbishop of Canterbury even publically denounced her!

Supposedly, Dors left over 2 million pounds to her son in her will. It could be unlocked via a secret code in the possession of her third husband, actor Alan Lake, but he killed himself soon after she died from cancer. Despite the best efforts of codebreakers and even a TV special, the money has never been found.

Anyways — Craze. There are plenty of British starlets in this, too. Juli Ege from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to name one. I chose to watch this because Suzy Kendall from Torso and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was in it. And Marianna Stone from Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? shows up as well.

It’s not horrible, but it’s very slow. Palance is great — of course he is — but even he has a lot to contend with here. You can watch it for yourself on Amazon Prime and see what you think.

Giallo intrigues me because you often have an unreliable narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised. In a 1981 study, William Riggan analyzed several types of unreliable narrators and in this film, I feel that we’re dealing with one of those types, the madman.

We open on a couple who is getting ready to make love on the beach. However, they meet a man who is parked there and suddenly notice a hanging woman that turns out to only be a mannequin. When they go to ask the man what’s happening, he drives away.

Christian (Robert Hoffman, A Black Veil for Lisa) and his girlfriend have similar romantic notions for the beach. That’s when they also discover a body facedown in the water. This body is still alive and belongs to Barbara (giallo queen Suzy Kendall, who appeared in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Torso and non-giallo Tales That Witness Madness), who can’t explain how she got there.

Christian becomes obsessed with her, following Barbara (along with his girlfriend) to a party where they find her with Alex, her current paramour. Our hero (such as he is) and Barbara both abandon their mates and leave the party, driving through a wooded area that is filled with numerous lingerie-clad mannequins that have been lynched. Christian confesses to her how his father treated him as a child while she tells him that Alex is more provider than partner.

That’s when Barbara makes a strange suggestion: before they have sex, Christian must shave. As he does, he’s attacked by Tatum. They fight and the man is killed with his own gun. Barbara is strangely fine with the whole thing and suggests that they run. He suggests that his brother can help, but she insists that no one can save them.

They then meet Malcolm and Clorinda, two squatters, who taunt Christian with news of a local murder. Thinking they are talking about him, he confesses and they laugh. Clorinda then mentions that she knows him and he rapes her. Or maybe he doesn’t. As I mentioned before, we’re starting to learn that we can’t trust our narrator.

When he wakes up the next morning, Christian can’t find Barbara nor any dead bodies or weapons. Then he sees Tatum and finds Malcolm’s dead body. Reality has stopped working. He becomes desperate and returns to his girlfriend’s apartment where he’s attacked by Tatum.

The man tells him that the plan wasn’t to kill him, but just to drive him insane. However, now things have gone too far. Christian escapes and hits Tatum with his car.

Convinced that he is in the middle of a conspiracy, he switches clothes with the dead man, puts the dead body in his car and shoves it off a cliff.

Barbara then arrives with another man — Luca — to see if Christian is dead. He follows them back to his family’s factory and learns that Tatum was correct. The plan all along was to make him go insane and lose his fortune to his brother. Barbara has fallen in love with him, but they tell her that she must go along with all of it. That’s when I realize who Fritz is…Ivan Rassimov! Man, next to George Eastman, I think we’ve reviewed more of his films here than anyone. If you haven’t seen him in anything, I’d recommend All the Colors of the Dark or Enter the Devil.

For some reason, Christian wanders the highways and acts as a male prostitute before a woman picks him up. Remember this.

Christian finds Barbara and tells her that he knows everything but still loves her. As they begin to make love, he looks at her face and it becomes the face of Clorinda, his girlfriend and the woman who picked him up as a prostitute. He kills her and runs away.

Meanwhile, Fritz has learned that Christian is not dead. As he watches family movies, we learn that Christian has had mental problems passed down from their father. Clorinda was really his nurse and Malcolm his doctor, but he raped and killed her, as well as every other woman he saw that had Barbara’s face.

Christian appears and is shot, but makes his escape, finally bleeding out on the same beach where he first met Barbara.

Fritz makes it back home and his closet is filled with the same lingerie-wearing mannequins that we saw in the trees, except these have been stabbed and disfigured. He begins to attack one of them as we learn that he is just as mentally unbalanced as his brother.

Directed by Umberto Lenzi (Orgasmo, Nightmare City, Ghosthouse/La Casa 3, Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive! and many more), this is an effectively tense film. Lenzi wanted to up the suspense by never showing the actual murders, but American producers felt that audiences would be too confused by this and added about ten minutes of footage with the murders and other elements to clarify the plot. According to Louis Paul’s Italian Horror Film Directors, George Romero may have shot this additional footage. Also — Lucio Fulci was the original choice to direct this film.

Scorpion Releasing put out a blu-ray of this recently that you can find at Diabolik DVD. This movie has my complete and total recommendation. You may figure out its plot and the fact that you can’t trust Christian’s grip on reality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable.