I’ll be honest. Other than Demons, which I attribute more to Argento than the director himself, I’ve never been a big fan of the films of Lamberto Bava. However, I’ve been wanting to give him another shot and this week’s Jack the Ripper theme allowed me to watch another of his films. After all, I did enjoy his first movie and initial giallo, Macabre.

Lamberto has always stated that he’s uneasy making giallo, saying “I find doing scenes where women get stabbed to death repugnant. Dario Argento does it so well, but I feel sick as soon as I see the knife in the murderer’s hand.” That doesn’t stop him from going all in with the gore in the very first scene!

Otherwise known as You Will Die At Midnight, this is very much an Argento style giallo. That’s not a bad thing. There’s plenty of stalking suspense, including a great chase through a museum that feels very much like Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Nicola is a policeman who learns that his wife is having an affair. They have a brutal fight where he leaves her bruised after trying to drown her in the kitchen sink. Sick at what he’s done, he runs from their home. As soon as he’s gone, a killer brutally stabs her in the shower.

Nicola is now the prime suspect in a series of murders, but his colleague and ex-girlfriend Anna (Valeria D’Obici, Moon Grey from Escape from the Bronx) thinks that this is the work of the Midnight Ripper, a serial killer that everyone believes has been dead for years.

Lamberto Bava is not afraid to present homages — or outright steal — from the greats. There’s a shower scene ala Psycho. A character sits and reads from a giallo novel with art referencing Argento’s Tenebre (it’s actually the Italian poster art for the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, but it steals a face from the Argento film!).

Even major plot points and the final chase have liberal elements lifted directly from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso. At least Lamberto shows sense of style here as he stitches together this quilt of giallo influences.

There’s also plenty of sexualized elements to the Midnight Ripper’s murders. Whomever it is — notice me being cagey about gender? — forces women to wear outfits before they murder them and uses handmixers on their dead bodies. Yeah — giallo really isn’t concerned with being politically correct, I guess. There are also a lot of bad 80’s outfits — or great ones, there’s such a fine line — in this movie.

Lara Wendel from Tenebre and Ghosthouse shows up, as does Paolo Marco, who played the therapist in The New York Ripper, Bob’s dad in The House by the Cemetery and the vice-president in Escape from the Bronx. Plus, with Claudio Simonetti providing the soundtrack, you know this is going to be a movie that sounds great.

I’ve gone on and on about the look of Italian cinema in my many reviews, about how the color is just perfect. Midnight Ripper is another film that fits in well with my love of bright hues and dark edges. I wouldn’t recommend this as the first giallo anyone watches, but if you’re well-versed in the genre, this has nice moments that will remind you of other films while keeping you interested throughout.

Have I reevaluated my feelings on Lamberto Bava? Somewhat, yes. Perhaps the downturn in his films neatly mirror the sad fate of the Italian horror industry in the 1980’s and 90’s, when even his mentor Argento’s work began to suffer.

You can get Midnight Ripper at Cult Action and Revok.

If all Ruggero Deodato did was make Cannibal Holocaust, he’d still be lauded — or despised — for his work. But he also directed cop films, like the violent Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The House on the Edge of the Park (which owes such a debt to The Last House on the Left that it even has the same actor as the villain, David Hess), jungle violence like Cut and Run, adventure films, erotic thrillers and even a movie starring The Barbarian Brothers called, well, The Barbarians.

For a director who changed genres and sought out his own versions on what was commercial at the time, it’s little wonder that eventually, Deodato would make a slasher. Sure, he was around 6 years later to the slasher craze party, but let’s forget that and just enjoy.

It all starts with two teens, Tony and Rose, who skip basketball practice to make out in the woods. Obviously, they haven’t learned the first rule of surviving a slasher film: do not screw in the woods. The craziest thing is her father knows that she’s going to do this and has a total “oh well, what can you do?” reaction. He does say that the woods are dangerous and there has been this urban legend of a Native American shaman killing people, but kids will be kids.

They’re quickly killed, in case you may have thought the first people we’d meet in a movie would be the main characters. The only witness to their murder is the child of the camp’s owners, who sees everything while he’s in the process of searching for his teddy bear.

Charles Napier is in here as Sheriff Charlie and go figure, he has a teddy bear on his dashboard. Look out! Deputy Sheriff Ted is Ivan Rassimov, a welcome sight to these tired eyes. And is that Doctor Olsen played by John Steiner? Why yes, it is!

Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black) and the aforementioned David Hess play the owners of the camp, who also have a strange love triangle — or so it seems — going on with Sheriff Charlie.

There’s also an RV filled with teenagers willing to break every law of the woods and court their violent deaths. This film lives up to its title — people are murdered horribly every few minutes — while proving that Italian exploitation directors have no compunction about doubling down on stealing things. Steal the doomed camp idea from Friday the 13th? That’s a good start. But what if that camp was built on a Native American burial ground like Poltergeist? Now you’re talking!

The dialogue in this film is exactly how you would imagine an Italian middle-aged man would think American teenagers talk, as they loudly yell about how much they like Iron Maiden in front of a campfire. They also loudly do Jazzercise, throw Frisbee, have sex, race dirtbikes (and make out on them!) and take plenty of showers to a non-stop blaring synth score courtesy of Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti.

Seriously, if there’s a man who knows what his audience wants, it’s probably Ruggero Deodato. There’s not really any story that you need to follow all that well, but if you stick around for a few minutes, you’ll be rewarded with either copious strangeness, nudity or gore — and often a combination of all three!

Even better, this all wraps up with the kind of out of nowhere twist ending that you’ve come to expect from Italian horror. Whew — this is the kind of movie that I can’t wait to watch again and I just finished it.

I’d like to thank Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum for continually reminding me to watch this and my Twitter pal eye von rassimov for finding a copy for me. Trust me — it’s difficult to get and I’m kind of shocked that Severin or Vinegar Syndrome haven’t released this on blu ray yet. I really hope that happens because as far as I know, every print available is so dark you can’t tell what’s going on.

It’s on Amazon Prime if you want to see it.

I love Comet. It’s like having old-time TV back, finding movies that you never knew existed as they are beamed directly into your home without you having to search for them. One Sunday afternoon, before a great nap, I discovered this one.

The Vicious Lips are trying to become the biggest rock band in the galaxy. Made up of Bree Synn (Gina Calabrese, The Dungeonmaster), Wynzi Krodo (Linda Kerridge, Marilyn from Fade to Black!) and Mandaa UUeu (Shayne Farris, who was also in Down Twisted with Kerridge), they’ve just lost their lead singer Ace to, well, death and need to get to a gig across the universe. Luckily, they find Judy Jetson (Dru-Anne Perry, who also plays Ace) and give her their dead singer’s name and get on their way.

I wanted to love this movie based on the first ten minutes or so, but then I realized that it came from Albert Pyun (The Sword And The Sorcerer, Cannon’s Captain America), so I had to adjust my excitement level. Here I was, hoping to get a movie about a punk rock girl band hellraising through the cosmos with the art direction of Heavy Metal and what I got was a hair ballad playing girl group slowly moving in a boring plot with art direction by whoever did the Rinse Dream’s Cafe Flesh or The Dark Brothers’ movies. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing actually. But here it is, as this film commits the cardinal sin of being boring.

If you still want to watch it, Shout! Factory has released it on blu-ray and you can watch it for free with your Amazon Prime membership.

Armand Mastroianni brought us the screen debut of Tom Hanks in He Knows You’re Alone. Here, he combines a cast of people who will make you say, “Hey isn’t that…” and puts them up against an army of undead Confederate soldiers.

During the Civil War, a Confederate town is taken over and all of the soldiers are ordered to walk a minefield, including young Jeremy, who is forced to do so because he has on the uniform. Only he and his mother survive.

Fast forward to 1986, where the Army’s 44th division — the same one that screwed over the southern soldiers in the past — are conducting war games under the command of Sgt. Leona Hawkins (yes, that’s Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek). There’s also Pvt. Ellis (Maxwell Caulfield, Rex Manning himself from Empire Records), Pvt. Lejune (Talia Balsam, Crawlspace and the first wife of George Clooney, as well as the daughter of Psycho‘s Martin Balsam), Pvt. Osgood (Levar Burton, uniting the original and TNG Star Trek casts), Pvt. Cort (Bobby Di Cicco, The Philadelphia Experiment), Pvt. Mendez (Scott fucking Jacoby from Bad Ronald) and Maurice Gibb in a cameo as a Union soldier (he also wrote a soundtrack that wasn’t used).

Of course, someone fucks around in the woods and the undead rise to claim the living. Everything feels rather low rent, which is fine, because the actual zombies look rather good and the reveal of who is behind the actual return of the dead is rather interesting.

This is way better than it should be and in the hands of a better director would have been pretty interesting. As it is, it’ll definitely pass an afternoon.

You can find it streaming on Amazon Prime. Otherwise, this has never come out on DVD, only a VHS release. They must have just taken one of those copies for the one that’s streaming, because it’ll remind you of renting a 1986 film after twenty years of rentals, tracking problems and all. If that makes you happy to read, thanks for being one of our readers. You’re on the right website.

A prank goes wrong on April Fool’s Day and suddenly, the makers of Friday the 13th realize that the title is already taken, so instead, we have Slaughter High. Really. It actually had that title until they discovered it was taken.

Years ago, the cool kids screwed Marty the nerd. However, these pranks go way past Carrie level, the movie the early scenes rip off, with Marty being shocked, stripped and dumped head first in a toilet bowl. Here’s something this movie has that few slashers do — full frontal male nudity (Sleepaway Camp doesn’t count, that’s full frontal transgender nudity and a massive spoiler).

Marty is then given a poisonous joint, which he smokes while doing a chemistry experiment, which says to me that he’s no kind of scientist. One set up by the cool kids later and his experiment has gone up in flames and his face has been doused with acid. I wonder what the yearbook was like that year.

Sometime in the future, those very same social elite of the school are invited back for a reunion. That said — the school is closed and the reunion is only for them.

What follows is exactly what you expect — Marty is back and he kills the rest of the gang in various ways. There’s acid melting someone’s stomach, impaling, acid baths, an electrocuted bed while a couple has sex, death by lawnmower and so much more.

After he kills everyone, Marty sees them come back from the dead in a scene that is absolutely nothing like the end of Maniac. I lied — it’s exactly like that movie, minus Joe Spinell going bonkers.

Marty then wakes up in an insane asylum, where he strangles a nurse and stabs a doctor in the eye with a hypodermic needle as if he just watched Halloween 2 or Dead and Buried.

The cast is nothing to write home about (most of them are British and often slip back into their native accents), save Simon Scudamore who is pure menace in the lead role (and who also committed suicide shortly after filming ended) and Caroline Munro, who is obviously wonderful in everything she does, from Starcrash to Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Also — Munro was 36 years old when this movie was filmed, so it stretches believability to make her a teenager. I’m not saying that she isn’t gorgeous, however.

This movie was written and directed by George Dugdale, Mark Ezra and Peter Mackenzie. Dugdale ended up marrying Munro and having two kids with her, so he probably did the best of anyone involved with this production. I always will remain forever jealous of him.

Slaughter High isn’t the best slasher ever. And it’s not the worst, either. It’s entertaining and a good one to put on at parties, where you don’t have to pay too much attention to it.

The newly revived Vestron Video re-released this on blu-ray last year and you can grab it at Diabolik DVD!

Movies like this are why we created this website. Terrorvision is a lunatic voyage into the 80’s with tongue planted so firmly in cheek, it’s gorily popping out the other side. It’s one of the strangest films you’ll see. And it gets a high recommendation from us. Why?

Ted Nicolaou directed more than just this movie — he was also behind Bad Channels and the Subspecies films. Here, he’s helped create a tale where a Hungry Beast from the planet Pluton ends up being beamed to the Putterman house through their fancy new satellite dish.

Oh, the Puttermans. We have Grandpa (Bert Remsen, who appeared in so many of Robert Altman’s movies), Sherman, the son, who idolizes the old man. Then there’s mom and dad (Mary Woronov and Gerrit Graham, a double bill of B and S favorites in the same film!), who just want to swing. And Suzy (Diane Franklin from Better Off Dead, Amityville 2: The Possession and all of Sam’s teenage yearnings) , who just wants to go out with her boyfriend OD (Jon Gries who is famous in our house from Fright Night Part 2 and more well known in everyone else’s as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite).

Holy shit! Is that Alejandro Ray from The Swarm and The Ninth Configuration as a swinger? Yes, it is. And he’s joined by Randi Brooks from Hamburger…The Motion Picture (someday, we’re really going to have to do HBO week and cover that one!).

The alien ends up earing everything it can while imitating other people. The kids all decide to use the beast for profit, but that backfires and it seems like only the alien from Pluton can save them when Medusa, a horror talk show host, shows up to party and thinks the alien is the bad guy. Whoops.

Terrorvision is a crazy cavalcade of ideas and music videos and just plain strangeness. It’s a movie made for pizza and beer, for teenage sleepovers and for whatever substances you have handy. This is probably the most slime you’ll ever see in a movie, too.

Luckily, Amazon Prime has this for free with membership. I spend hours curating our next up list there and this was waiting to be watched for some time. It was worth the wait!

PS — The artwork for this movie comes from the shirt that Cavity Colors created. All of their products are great and so is their service! Grab one of these shirts while they last!