He said of this movie, “That’s why Surviving Edged Weapons is so fascinating. It’s like a police department gave some kid like fresh out of film school $30,000 and this kid was like, “I’m gonna make a masterpiece.” I swear to God, so it opens with two cavemen in an argument, and one of the cavemen takes a sharp rock and stabs the other and then the narrator comes in and says, “Since the dawn of time, men have been using edged weapons to kill each other.” It’s so weird. It’s so profoundly weird. I can’t get over it.”
No matter how much he prepared me for it, I wasn’t ready.
According to Calibre Press’ website, director Dennis Anderson and author Charles Remsberg published Street Survival: Tactics for Armed Encounters in 1980. They claim that “this book changed the law enforcement landscape by introducing new tactics, personal stories, and real scenarios. Within a year of its publication, the Street Survival Seminar was born and quickly grew to become the most popular and respected resource for officer tactical training in the country.”
While they no longer sell this video on their site, they do have a course entitled “Advanced Leadership in a Police Reform Era” that uses children’s building blocks to spell the word “defund.” There’s another called “Surviving Hidden Weapons” that uses a lipstick tube with a blade. I obviously need to see that.
But first, let me explain Surviving Edged Weapons.
I’ve heard that this was made in Canada and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, even though Calibre is based in Glen Ellyn, IL. They also sell a koozie that says, “One drink away from telling everyone exactly what I think.” Keep in mind that everything else on this site is about police response.
Narrated by Ronald Rolland, this has the production quality of Unsolved Mysteries and I mean that as a compliment. And yes, this begins with a Cain and Abel murder that explains that edged weapons have been with us forever. Then, your jaw will drop as this alternates between police officers showing off their scars and discussing how they’ve been stabbed — including an astounding ending where a cop is brought to tears by the memory and cries the thickest, deepest, saddest tears I have ever seen in my entire existence — and being an action movie, to the point that stuntman Dan Inosanto (who shows up in Game of Death, Sharky’s Machineand Out for Justice) is in it.
So yes, Officer James Phillips may say, “In my mind, I’m never gonna die in no ghetto. Absolutely never. A man turns around and punches me in the head, the fight’s on. If he cuts me, the fight’s on. If I’m shot, the fight is on. I’m not losing no fight to no scumbag out there in no ghetto, period. That’s it. No son of a bitch out there is gonna get me. The only way he gets me is cut my head off, and I mean that. I’ll fight you til I got a breath left in me. I don’t think any of those animals in that street can beat me. I’ve been going that way for eighteen years of street service, street duty, and that’s the way I’m gonna keep on going. You don’t lose the fight.” But you also get a Black Mass being interrupted by the police, a domestic disturbance turning into a meatcleaver going directly into someone’s head and a series of wounds closing with a full-on uncut dead cock on camera.
You will learn how criminals place knives in their jeans so they cut up cops hands, discover how the streets are non-stop terror and hear a man say, “Fuck me? Fuck you!” in a way that Bob Odenkirk had to have heard it. The VHS cover of Halloween is shown as part of our country’s knife culture and the narration says it “glorifies the blade.” A man in a Corvette with the license plate KILME stabbing himself. This is at once so much better than it needed to be and more reactionary than you’d expect a cop training video to be, even one made nearly forty years ago.
I’m saying this with no hyperbole. This is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve ever seen and if you come to my house and want to watch movies with me, there’s a really good chance I’m going to suggest we watch it. It’s like the unmade Death Wish 6 but on a smaller scale, shown to real people to prepare them for the thankless job of protecting the lambs from the wolves. It makes me reflect on how liberal real life me is and how jingoistic and needing for carnage movie watching me is, a juxtaposition that sometimes throws me into panic, but there you go. This movie will make you confront things, like how you might not like the fact that we live in a police state, but you certainly don’t want to do that job, and you even step away with some level of respect. Or worry. I can’t figure it out, but I’ll get back to you when I watch this four or five more times.
Jenõ Hódi is the founder and managing director of the Budapest Film Academy. He studied in America at Columbia University, where he was taught by Milos Forman, Brian De Palma, Frank Daniel, John Avildsen and Dusan Makavejev. This all leads us to the films he made in the U.S., and like any director breaking into films in the 1990s, he made movies that would succeed on video and cable, like Guns & Lipstick and the vampire movie Metamorphosis. That also means that he has an erotic thriller on his resume. Or a slasher. It’s in-between, so maybe, just maybe, it’s a Giallo.
John Doe (Joe Paradise) is a maintenance man at Gotham College who deals with the abuse he’s given every day by killing rats in experiments and lining their bodies up in a fridge. He has a plan to use laced ice cream to murder women, which will get him a million dollars. What will he do with all that money? I don’t think he knows or cares.
One of his victims was almost Denise (Darnell Martin, who would go on to direct I Like It Like That, thanks Outlaw Vern!), who survives and ends up having an undercover cop named Dino Andretti (Jeffrey R. Iorio) protect her and her roommate Pamela (Monica Breckenridge). The police think John Doe is going to come back after Denise, and they’re right, as he comes after her just as Pamela finally shoots her shot and tries to go from roommate to partner. That’s a horrible time for a slasher killer to show up, but here we are.
But how he does it pushes this movie into another place. As Pamela is swimming, John pelts her with basketballs in the dark before getting close and killing her. Then, he Weekend at Bernie’s her body and then uses a chain to try and choke the life out of her. That’s commitment. How does she fight him? She uses a pitching machine to blast him right in the nuts.
Alright, I love this movie.
Not only does this have a heavy metal song over the credits, but the killer quotes Hall and Oates. The director made this at Columbia with other students before he graduated, yet it’s better than so many other slashers despite coming out in late 1988. A heroine who stops eating ice cream—which saves her life—so she can do a shower scene? I’m shocked that this isn’t winking at us more.
Dino may be the worst slasher cop ever, as he stays in the apartment with the girls, trying to make it with both of them, goes through Denise’s underwear, exposes himself to Pamela, and turns on gigantic sunglasses — the kind you buy on vacation as a joke and never wear — when told to settle down. He then ends up in a relationship with the final girl because you can’t get thrown off the force for this kind of behavior in a 1988 direct-to-video slasher movie.
Defund the slasher police!
How has this never been released by Vinegar Syndrome? It’s totally their kind of movie!
Directed and co-written by Sollace Mitchell (with Karyn Kay), this is the story of Anna (Patricia Charbonneau), a newspaper writer who feels a distance from her live-in author lover, Alex (Sam Freed), who is only excited about getting to writer about fast food.
One evening, she thinks she’s received a dirty phone call from him, the spice she’s looking for in her life. Instead, she’s in a dive bar waiting to meet a stranger, running away and accidentally watching two criminals, Jellybean (Stephen McHattie) and Switchblade (Steve Buscemi) too closely. They think she has their money. She has no idea who they are, much less the heavy-breathing caller who keeps dialing her almost every night.
Every man around Anna is a milquetoast that still wants to control her. So when she gets caught in the world of dead cops and someone who calls her in the middle of the night, telling her to make love to herself with an orange that gets juices all over her thighs, can you blame her when she whispers, “Push orange slices into my cunt with your tongue” and asks the caller to penetrate his own orange before realizing her lame boyfriend has been watching all along?
Anna is also pretty dumb, I must confess. Is her life so bereft of thrills that all she has are phone calls? She’s gorgeous. She doesn’t even need a boyfriend, as she has a career. Maybe she’s co-dependent, as her friend Cori (Patti D’Arbanville) calls out:
Anna: Cori, I’m not the only woman who gets obscene phone calls.
Cori: No, but you’re the only one I know who talks to them.
I wanted this to be closer to either a Giallo or a movie that let Anna finally explore her kink with someone less dull than her lame best male friend. I want her to have more. I want her to be smarter. I want her, in short, to explore her wants.
As a sad aside, co-writer Karyn Kay died way too young, at 63, killed by her 19-year-old son Henry Wachtel. After her career in Hollywood, she’d started teaching Creative Writing at LaGuardia, a New York City performing arts school. In this article on Crime Reads, the author shares her real-life experience of having Kay as a teacher. It’s worth a read.
If you’re interested, Anna gives her phone number in this movie: 212-627-2363.
Man, was Nello Rossati dating Franco Nero’s daughter or something? Not only did he get him into this movie, but a year later he would be the person — well, his pseudonym Ted Archer did, but you get the point — to finally get him to come back to his most famous role in Django Strikes Again. He also made the giallo La gatta in calore(assistant directed by Lamberto Bava and shot by Aristide Massaccesi!), a Napoleon-sploitation film called Bona parte di Paolina, a sex comedy called The Sensuous Nurse with Ursula Andress and Jack Palance, the poliziotteschi Don’t Touch the Children!, another sex comedy called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-esque film named Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, and an I Spit On Your Grave revengeomatic called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón.
Needless to say, I’m a fan.
Ted Angelo (Nero) starts the movie off literally telling a woman that he’s too tired to make love. Is this the great hero of Italian cinema? He seems exhausted throughout but it works; he’s a writer fallen on hard times and harder drinking. He’s supposed to be writing a book on pre-Columbian civilizations, but he’s falling deeper and deeper into depression and drunken days to the point that he’s fired by his publisher — and ex-wife — Maureen De Havilland (Miss World 1977 Mary Stävin, who by this point had already appeared in Adam Ant’s “Strip” video, Octopussyand A View to a Kill, as well as releasing the exercise album Shape Up and Dance with footballer George Best).
It seems like Ted’s luck is changing when he’s shown a ton of writings that came from a shipwreck of Spanish conquistadores. Except that the ship isn’t on the bottom of the ocean. It’s in a cave. And maybe that luck’s bad, because everyone connected with the ship, like art dealer Alonso Quintero (William Berger) is dying under mysterious circumstances. And oh yeah. That shipwreck in a cave is also inside a UFO.
The only real good luck that Ted gets is when an art historian and friend of Quintero named June (Deborah Barrymore, who is not related to Drew, but is instead of the daughter of Roger Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) helps him out.
What follows is a delirious descent into madness to the point that if you told me this was all a drug trip, I’d believe you. First, Ted is almost run over by former Nazi Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, who is only in the movie for this one scene), then the camera crew he hires ends up being CIA spooks who want to murder him, then the KGB gets involved and then things get really weird.
Ted gets the idea that Maureen has the kind of connections that can save him and June. As they wait for her, a cyborg Rodrigo Obregón attacks them and only stops when he’s hit by a bull. He gets torn apart and sounds like he’s trying to say the words to “Humpty Dumpty” and man, I literallyjumped aout of my chair in the middle of the night I was so excited. He looks like Johnny Craig drew him!
Somehow, the movie then decides to top itself as another Rodrigo Obregón cyborg that looks exactly the same shows up with Maureen, who removes her skin to show us that she’s one of the aliens that have been on Earth for twelve thousand years and now are in control of most countries and multinational corporations.
At this point, is there any hope for any of us?
Yes, this is a movie where a gorgeous Swedish woman takes off all of her epidermis — of course we see her breasts, this is an Italian movie — to reveal that she’s a lizard alien that fulfills the worries of David Icke, then she vomits slime all over herself and tries to kill Franco Nero with her giant tongue.
If you told me this was an actual alien, I would believe you.
The first few times I’ve tried to watch this, I couldn’t get into it. It was too slow and felt too downbeat with Nero’s character feeling hopeless. So don’t be like me. I beg you, stick with this for an hour. Just an hour, because it’s not bad. I mean, yes, Franco Nero survives a car chase by throwing eggs, but it’s just slow, not badly made.
But the last thirty minutes make it all worth it.
When you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
This is a movie all about the foreplay and then when it’s time to get to the actual sex, it’s the weirdest and best Penthouse Forum sex you’ve ever had and you feel like there’s no way that it happened and no one will ever believe you.
Also: Franco Nero screams almost every line and I respect that.
Also also: This is like a budget They Live by people who never saw that movie.
Also also also: This ends with Franco Nero living in a Cannibal Holocaustparadise and a song that sounds like something Disney characters would sing to.
The Cauldron Films blu ray release of Top Line has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include interviews with Nero and Ercolani, a featurette on the alien theories of the film by parapolitics researcher Robert Skvarla and an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Eric Zaldivar including audio interviews from cast members, Deborah Moore and Robert Redcross, as well as additional insight on Italian cult films with actors Brett Halsey and Richard Harrison.
The third disc of Severin’s new Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits blu ray set has several documentaries and some shorts that are worth the entire price of this release. You can buy it from Severin.
The Art of the Calendar (2024): Kier-La Janisse has created this look at the art of film programming and marketing. Starting with the first repertory cinema calendars in California and Chicago in the late 70s and early 80s, this expands to interview several film programmers, including Mike Thomas (founder of Strand Releasing), Kim Jorgensen (founder of Landmark Cinemas), Craig Baldwin, Chicago film historian Adam Carston and Mark Valen (programmer for the Scala).
Thanks to this age of physical media and streaming that we live in, small theaters like the ones featured in this film, are always in danger of going away. More than just a “things were better back then” view, The Art of the Calendar presents a strong reason for you to support the movie houses around you, particularly the non-corporate ones that need you in their audience.
Also: If you love graphic design and the art of selling movies, this is an essential watch.
Splatterfest Exhumed (2024): This documentary covers Splatterfest ’90, the notorious all-night horror festival held at London’s legendary Scala Cinema. Directed by Jasper Sharp with David Gregory as supervising producer, this gets into how this well-remembered weekend was put together by a teenaged Justin Stanley and how it was amazing that it even happened at all.
Splatterfest ’90 was the UK premiere of several movies and the showing of several favorites, including Combat Shock, Evil Dead II, Brain Dead, Rabid Grannies, Within the Woods, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Document of the Dead, The Laughing Dead, The Toxic Avenger 2 and Bride of Re-animator; promo reels for Maniac 2, Horrorshow and Hardware; as well as the opportunity to meet horror icons like John McNaughton, Greg Nicotero, Brian Yuzna, Buddy Giovinazzo, Roy Frumkes and Scott Spiegel.
What emerges is a combination of people extolling the virtues of just how this event brought so many together with the challenges of running just such a massive undertaking. You also get to hear from those who were in the audience, such as Graham Humphries, Sean Hogan and Severin founder David Gregory.
My favorite parts in this concern how in the middle of the night, bootleggers suddenly arrived to sell tapes of banned video nasties and how The Comic was presented as the first film from a “new Hammer,” which stopped when the audience nearly rioted during the movie. It was so bad that the organizers didn’t show Cold Light of Day, another film by director Richard Driscoll.
This is perfect for lovers of horror, as well as movie history. I had a blast with it and am sad that I couldn’t have been in the audience.
Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie (1986): A proof of concept for a sequel to Maniac that never happened, this was directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock) and written by Joe Cirillo and its star Joe Spinell.
Shot in a bar that Spinell frequented and filled with his friends, this was a concept featuring Spinell as Mr. Robbie, a drunken kid show host who is dealing with letter after letter from abused children. The only way that he knows to deal with them is murder. What’s strange is that this is the same plot — and nearly the same name for its protagonist — as An Eye for an Eye/The Psychopath, a movie that finds Mr. Rabbey attacking parents who beat their children.
You only get a few minutes of what may have been, but when I see the craggy face of Joe Spinell, I feel like life could be OK. In some other world, I’ve bought this several times and just got the UHD release of it, having to explain to my wife why I keep buying the same film so many times.
I adore that Giovinazzo did a commentary for this, explaining how it happened and some of the sleazier things that he learned about the cast and where this was filmed.
Horrorshow (1990): Director and writer Paul Hart-Wilden wrote the script for the little-seen — and great — movie Skinner. He also wrote Living Doll, but Dick Randall gave it to George Dugdale and Peter Mackenzie Litten to direct.
It’s got a simple story — a man tries to stay in a room only to learn that it’s still possessed by a demon that has already killed one person — but it has plenty of gore to make it stand out. Its creator is obviously a big horror fan and his commentary on working on this is quite interesting. Hart-Wilden is still working, directing the TV series 31 Days of Halloween.
Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter (1982): Directed by Josh Becker, who wrote it with Scott Spiegel, this is a little-watched short that has many of the players of the Evil Dead series, including Bruce Campbell as the hero, Sam Raimi as a Nazi and Robert Tapert as a native.
As you can tell, Cleveland Smith is pretty much Indiana Jones, down to being chased by a bolder, but he also gets caught in quicksand and is nearly killed by a dinosaur. He has a whip, just like Dr. Jones, but he also has a ventriloquist dummy and a special pair of pants known as the Waders of the Lost Park.
This is totally politically incorrect and as dumb as it gets. I mean that in the best of ways.
Mongolitos (1988): Director Stéphane Ambiel made this short that the Scala ad copy claimed “Taking ten minutes to do what John Waters achieved in ten years.” This is great for selling the movie, but it’s nowhere in Waters league. That said, it has something to offend everyone, including shooting up with toilet water, puking up a turd, pushing a transgender woman’s head into the bowl while taking her from behind while a nun teams up on her and then everyone eating feces with crackers. I can only imagine that some people will be horribly upset by this, but it’s made so goofily that you can’t help but laugh at it. Somewhere, staunchly British people are also upset that the French are doing a Monty Python sketch with poo eating.
The Legendary H.G. Lewis Speaks! (1989): Herschell Gordon Lewis is at the center of the Venn diagram of my life, someone who was a leader in my two obsessions: movies and marketing. Just hearing his voice makes me feel good about things, like everything is going to work out alright. When you see his older face and his wry smile, you may almost forget that he once used animal guts dumped in Lysol over and over again in the Florida heat to upset almost everyone before anyone even considered what a gore movie was.
This was filmed on October 4, 1989, when Lewis spoke at the Scala before Gruesome Twosome and Something Weird. Before he went on stage, he asked to be paid in cash. At once a gentleman in a suit and a carny lunatic, at the dual poles of juxtaposition, only he could wax so enthusiastically about fried chicken and trying to figure out how to get Colonel Sanders into one of his movies.
Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.
Directed and written by Jan Švankmajer, this dark take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland looks like nothing else. This was Švankmajer’s first full-length movie after twenty years of making shorts.
Instead of writing the entire plot out, let me explain as best as I can what I remember of this: the White Rabbit coming back to life, shaking off its taxidermy and being a real animal again, breaking through the glass of his case, leading Alice on a journey that takes her past doors and on elevators to another world. Alice drinks ink and becomes a doll, then emerges from that same doll as a human again. Alice’s tears being so plentiful that she fills a room with them and swims away. A mechanical tea party, a pig dressed in baby clothes and so many other images that it goes into overload.
You know that people got really stoned or dropped acid and watched this. I’d like you to know that this could be one of the most dangerous movies to watch on substances. This is pure movies drugs, a film ready to take you on a bad trip all on its own. 10/10, no notes.
Ninjas. “Life means nothing to them,” says Mister Tanaka, a man who shows up in this wearing an outfit like my dad in the mid 80s, a striped red polo and short shorts.
If you ask IFD what this Joe Law directed and written movie is about, they’d say, “A Japanese scientist tries to conceal a deadly formula, but an undead ace and his ninja devils are determined to use it to cause mischief and mayhem. It is up to Lung, a master of the lost art of Hocus Pocus, to keep evil at bay and prevent mass destruction on a global scale.”
Sure, maybe.
IMDB lists the director as Chi Lo, who used the name Joe Law to make Crippled Masters and Lo Ke to direct Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. Seeing as how this was produced by Joseph Lai and Betty Chan, all bets are off.
Or maybe this is the same movie as American Commando Ninja and combines a Taiwanese TV show, another movie called Born a Ninja and the kind of dialogue that only can come from a 1980s dubbed into incomprehension ninja movie can give you. Or it’s Silent Killers. It could have so many titles and it would still be hard to tell you what happened.
Let me try.
Mister Tanaka has a secret formula from World War II that just could destroy the world. That much is true. Two women want the formula and they are Becky, who wears a yellow vest and Confederate flag shorts, but I think that means she’s into late 70s and early 80s redneck trends in America a little too late as they move across the globe and isn’t racist like my neighbor who wears short shorts and throws away all his kids toys after his wife took them and also has a huge Southern Cross up on his garage wall despite being an Italian man in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Did I go on a tangent? Becky is joined by Brenda, who loves denim so much she’s wearing it on the top and bottom. They’re joined by master of the hocus pocus style, Larry, which involves your everyday kung fu but also the ability to shoot fire out of his fingertips.
As for the bad guy ninja, that’s Meng Fei, who was also in the Ninja Death trilogy, Night Orchid, Everlasting Chivalry, The Sun Moon Legend and Middle Kingdom’s Mark of Blood. He’s pretty amazing in the last fight scene.
Anyways, Mister Tanaka keeps dreaming of dead people that were killed by this secret back in the war and the secret is a mirrored mustache that you put on a devil mask. There’s also a white ninja named David who battles Larry before they decide to be friends, get a room and drink beer and eat fried cabbage.
Or maybe that was the last movie? Have years of drinking, substances and Godfrey Ho movies dulled my reason and when confronted by this synth-scored shot on video wonder my mind just wanders in between different martial worlds, unsure of all the things I’ve seen, all the ninja deaths I’ve felt as if they were my own? In truth, the only important thing is that ninjas can become straw men and that you can swallow a sword in the middle of a fight and live.
I do know one thing. When David sees Larry hanging out with the two ladies, he says, “Two chicks? You one animal!” That’s exactly how I felt.
The Brivido Giallo Collection collects the four film series directed by Lamberto Bava. Each film in this set is a standalone fully featured production that was completed between 1987 – 1989. The films stories are not connected, but were collected together for Italian television near the end of the 80s.
Cauldron Films is collecting all four movies — Until Death, Graveyard Disturbance, Dinner with a Vampire, and The Ogre — on blu ray for the first time in a limited edition five disc set with each movie fully uncut and restored from 4K scans of the 35mm film negatives, loaded with brand new cast and crew featurettes by Eugenio Ercolani (including 4 with Lamberto Bava himself) and an exclusive new interview with composer Simon Boswell, all housed in a rigid outer box with four folded posters featuring new artwork by Eric Adrian Lee.
Graveyard Disturbance (1987): I used to have a complicated relationship with Lamberto Bava. And by that, I mean that for every Demons, there’s a Devilfish. But then I realize that I kind of like Blastfighter, love Macabre and even kind of dig Delirium. I always giae him another chance and finally, one day, I came around to liking what Lamberto directed.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: Until Death, The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire and this film.
Originally titled Dentro il cimitero (Inside the Cemetery), this spoof of Italian horror is about five twentysomething teenagers who make a bet with an entire town — which is literally referred to as the kind of place from An American Werewolf In London — to see if they can survive one evening inside a series of catacombs. Not only are there zombies and vampires in there, there’s also death itself.
It all starts off with plenty of promise, as our gang of young punks has the most 80s van ever, complete with an image from Heavy Metal, U2 and Madonna. After the crew shoplifts, they go on the run and straight into supernatural trouble.
The person they’re stealing from? Lamberto. Which is only fair, as he uses this movie to rip off everything from — sorry, spoof or pay homage to — Carnival of Souls and Phenomena to his father’s Black Sunday and any number of zombie movies.
So where does the eating come in? Well, there’s one great scene in here where an entire family of multiple eyed creatures all dine on rotten food. This moment had to have inspired Pan’s Labyrinth.
The Cauldron release of Graveyard Disturbance includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti; interviews with Bava, Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Karl Zinny, Massimo Antonello Geleng and Roberto Ricci; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
Until Death (1988): As I mentioned above, I felt like I had never given Lamberto a fair chance. Then again, whenever I say that, people always remark that I’m always mentioning that I like his movies. Demons is a near-perfect movie but I’ve always qualified that by saying that he had Argento, Franco Ferrin and Dardano Sacchetti on board along with Michele Soavi as assistant director. And then I think, well, you know, I kind of really like Macabre and it has some really grimy stuff in it. A Blade In the Dark, Blastfighter, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance, The Ogre, Demons 2 and Midnight Ripper all have charms. I’ve even come around to liking Delirium e foto di Gioia, Maybe not Monster Shark. But the more I think about it, I really do like Lamberto Bava.
This is the movie that put me over the edge into perhaps even love.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance and Until Death.
There were some hurt feelings about this movie when it was made. It was based on an older script by Dardano Sacchetti, but Lucio Fulci went on record saying that he was planning on making an adaption of The Postman Always Rings Twice with the title Evil Comes Back. Fulci said that Sacchetti wrote it up and sent it to several producers and later found out that when Luciano Martino bought it, his name wasn’t on it. Fulci said, “…because of our friendship I decided not to sue Sacchetti, but I did break off all relations with him.” Sacchetti responded, “The producer of Evil Comes Back didn’t have the budget required, and he gave up to do the film. That’s it. Years later, as the screenplay was mine, I sold it to another producer who used it for a b-movie with Lamberto Bava.”
Gioia Scola really could have been a remembered giallo queen if she’d come along 15 years early. As it is, she was in some of my favorite late 80s films in the genre, including Obsession: A Taste for Fear, Too Beautiful to Die, Suggestionata and Evil Senses.
In this film, she plays Linda, a woman whose husband Luca (Roberto Pedicini) left her eight years ago. All the men of the small village wondered why he’d leave behind such a stunning woman. In fact, this movie could have been called Ogni uomo vuole scopare Linda. She gave birth to Luca’s son and unknown to the town, has since become the wife of the man who helped kill her husband, Carlo (David Brandon).
Together, they run a small hotel near the lake. During one rainy night, Marco (Urbano Barberini) arrives to stay. And it seems like he knows way too much about what’s going on. Her son Alex (Marco Vivio) may as well, as he wakes up every night screaming, dreaming of his father clawing his way out of a muddy grave. She hires Marco as the handyman, but Carlo thinks they’re sleeping together. In no way can this turn out well.
How does Marco know where all the old clothes are kept? How does he already know the family recipes? And why is he so close so quickly with Alex?
What’s intriguing is how close this is in story and tone, yet goes off on its own path, to Bava’s father’s film Shock. The difference is where the father would use camera tricks and tone to create a mood of dread, his son will put you directly into the middle of the muck and grue with comic book lighting and great looking effects from Angelo Mattei. And keeping the family tradition going, Lamberto’s son Fabrizio was the assistant director. How wild that Mario’s grandson was AD on movies like Zoolander 2 and Argento’s Giallo and The Card Player, using the name Roy Bava for those last two movies.
My favorite fact about this movie is that it was released on VHS as The Changeling 2: The Revenge. Trust me, it has nothing to do with The Changeling.
The Cauldron release of Until Death includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth; interviews with Bava, Battaglia, David Brandon and Massimo Antonello Geleng; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
The Ogre (1989): Following the success of the film Demons and Demons 2, this film was announced as part of Bava’s TV movie series. The script, written by Dardano Sacchetti, is pretty much the original script for The House By the Cemetery before Lucio Fulci added to the tale. Seeing as how it was a TV movie, there was some self-censorship, as Bava said that were this a real movie, the ogre would have eaten children.
Cheryl (Virginia Bryant, Demons 2, The Barbarians) is a sexually confused American writer of horror novels who traves to Italy with her husband Tom (Paolo Malco, The New York Ripper, Thunder) and son Bobby — yep, little Bob, but not Giovanni Frezza — to work on her next book.
She begins to have nightmares of childhood memories of being stalked by an ogre and becomes convinced that the house has a curse on it that is bringing her past memories into our reality.
Alex Serra, who was the blind man from the original Demons, also shows up. Speaking of Demons, this movie was released outside of Italy as the third film in that series. As you’ll soon learn from the Demoni sequels, it has nothing to do with the first two films. Even more confusing, this was released on DVD in Germany as Ghosthouse II, the sequel to the Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse/La Casa 3. That movie is confusing, too, as it’s the third movie in the La Casa series, which translates to house in Italian, but has nothing to do with the movie House. Instead, Evil Dead is known as La Casa in Italy.
Want more info on how all that works? Check this article out on La Casa and this article about the Demons movies.
The Cauldron release of The Ogre includes commentary by Rachel Nisbet; interviews with Bava, Geleng and Ricci; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
Dinner With a Vampire (1989): Four actors — Gianni (Riccardo Rossi, the Italian voice of Simba in The Lion King), Rita (Patrizia Pellegrino), Monica (Yvonne Sciò, who was in the Tal Bachman video for “She’s So High”) and Sasha (Valeria Milillo) have won their audition to appear in a new horror movie. As they’re on the way to meet Jurek the director (George Hilton, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris) — who lives in a large castle — they learn that he’s a vampire and has a challenge: he believes that they can kill him.
There are movies within a movie. There’s a hunchbacked assistant named Giles (Daniele Aldrovandi). And there’s lots of gore, particularly at the end. Written by Bava with Dardano Sacchetti, this comedy isn’t going to change your world, but it will entertain you unless you have a major issue with goofy humor.
The Cauldron release of Dinner With a Vampire includes commentary by Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth; interviews with Bava, George Hilton, Geleng and Boswell; a trailer; a poster with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reverse blu ray wrap with the original artwork.
The set also comes with a soundtrack compilation CD featuring tracks from each Brivido Giallo film curated and supplied by composer Simon Boswell.
This is an incredibly exciting set! Here’s to more Italian TV movies making their way here.
A man named Kure Ichiro (Yoji Matsuda) wakes in an asylum with no memory and is told by Dr. Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) and Dr. Masaki (Shijaku Katsura) that he’s blocking the past as he killed his bride on his wedding day. However, his treatment begins to confuse fantasy and reality, especially a manuscript called Dogra Magra.
Based on the novel by Kyusaku Yumeno and the last film of director Toshio Matsumoto, Dogra Magra is a movie that features a hospital filled with pickled punk babies in jars, doctors who try and convince a man that he’s a character in a novel, rotten corpses and a reality that may or may not be true. One of the doctors might now even be alive.
This is a film with no easy answers and maybe the best way to watch it is just to let it wash over you and try to figure it all out on the tenth rewatch.
Presented on blu ray for the first time outside of Japan, this Radiance Films release has a digital transfer supervised by director of photography Tatsuo Suzuki and producer Shuji Shibata. It also has commentary and an interview with director Toshio Matsumoto; a visual essay by programmer and curator Julian Ross; information on the Ahodara Sutra chant by legendary street performer Hiroshi Sakano; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow; a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Hirofumi Sakamoto, president of the Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive and author Jasper Sharp on screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya, an interview with producer Shuji Shibata and Matsumoto’s director’s statement; and it’s all in a limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.
Yes, Nico Mastorakis, the same maniac who made Island of Death, Blind Date and The Zero Boys, made a Police Academyripoff. It also checks off another box with an appearance by Phillip, who is pretty much James Bond. Also, because this is Mastorakis, there’s some full-frontal nudity.
Also, Mastorakis never meant to actually direct the film, but after seeing that some of the dailies, he fired the original director and took over.
Gerald Okamura, the Hard Master from the first G.I. Joe movie and one of the hatchet men in Big Trouble In Little China, is Chiba, a man who owns a ninja academy in Topanga Canyon. His enemy owns Beverly Hills Ninja Academy. And just like Camp North Star and Camp Mohawk, they must battle.
There’s a mime, a klutz, some attractive women, a wiseacre and all the things you expect from this genre. Is Police Academyripoff a genre? It is now.
Also: a band on the soundtrack is called The Piggy Dicks. That is now my favorite band name ever.
This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has a new interview with Gerald Okamura, looking back on his role as Chiba and his career as an actor and martial artist. You also get a trailer for the movie.
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