My expectations may be lowered, but I tend to like Lamberto Bava’s TV efforts — Graveyard Disturbance and The Ogre are two examples — more than his theatrical movies.
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 taking 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 he 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.
There’s an incredible version of this posted by Dr. Sapirstein on YouTube:
Pop and Bernie have a good angle. Pop saddles up to campers and tells them how much he misses his dead son, who is really insane and kept in a straightjacket in a trailer until the campers trust his dad and then he is unleashed. Pop gets their gear, Bernie gets to kill, we have a movie called Moonstalker.
This is a movie nobody talks about because, well, who was watching slashers other than mutants like me and you in 1989?
Also known as Camper Stamper, A Demon Is Loose (Brazil), Bloody Moon (Mexico) and Terror Camp (Argentina), It also rips off John Carpenter both visually and audibly. About the only cool thing I can call this out for is Marcie, who wears a camp bikini, carries a whip and gets off to Wagner. So there’s that at least.
You may not care now, but when the Vinegar Syndrome $59.95 slipcase edition comes out, you will.
God bless you, Lucio Fulci. By 1989, things were so rough that you loaned your name to several movies that said that they were presented by you. Those five films — Bloody Psycho, Hansel e Gretel, Massacre, Sodoma’s Ghost and Touch ofDeath* — are all of varying qualities, but when they work, well — they work. They deliver what our basest instincts want in a Fulci film.
Directed by Leandro Lucchetti (who also wrote Vampire In Venice) from a script that he wrote with Giovanni Simonelli (the writer of the giallo The Crimes of the Black Cat and the director of Hansel e Gretel), it’s all about psychic Dr. Werner Vogler, who has come to a castle to heal the broken body of the lady of the house, who has a special relationship with her maid. And if you’ve seen enough Italian horror, you know exactly what I mean.
Somehow, the faith healing tai chi doctor ends up hooking up with the granddaughter of the crippled woman and they have without a doubt the most upsetting sex scene I’ve ever seen in which they pour liters upon liters of dairy products all over one another and scoop it out of one another’s mouths. Seriously, I must have watched this scene three times just to write how appalled I was by it.
There’s also a creepy doll, lots of dreams of murder and a corpse in a wheelchair. Then, this movie was pronounced dead and its best effects were packed in ice to later be transplanted into Cat in the Brain.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. As I watched this in the basement in the middle of the night, Becca had fallen asleep to a marathon of the other Halloween movies, so that this film — which copies the Carpenter format down to a song that is near-identical to the theme that he wrote — would play music or a scene, I could hear the original coming down through the vents.
John Radley was abused by every kid and his mother, all of his animals died on him, his daddy gave him a name and then he walked away and then he falls down a well after a prank and gets sent to Oakhurst State mental hospital. Scarred and not in our reality any longer, John can no longer feel empathy or pain.
Now, he’s killing everyone who ever done him wrong, taking their body parts and offering them to the only person who ever treated him right, his childhood crush Gretchen. The fact that he’s doing that as toppings on the many pizzas he delivers to her makes this even more disturbing.
La casa del sortilegio (The House of the Spell) finds our old friend Umberto Lenzi making a TV movie that fits right into his Ghosthouse style and I, for one, could not be happier.
This is one of four films in the Doomed Houses series of films that also includes his The House of Lost Souls and Fulci’s The Sweet House Of Horrorsand The House of Clocks. And he decides that what this movie needs is lots of the hero having visions of losing his head and having it thrown into cauldrons and giant vats of soup. And you know what they say, there ain’t no fake severed head like an Italian fake severed head.
Also: our hero Luke has a tarot-obsessed wife named Martha and if I know my Italian exploitation conventions — and you know I do — anyone named Martha is evil.
Also also: Italian directors hate cats and Lenzi says, “I guess I’ll continue that tradition,” and has a scene where someone throws at TV at a black cat and it exposes on impact.
You better believe that the words La Casa were really big on the posters for this. I mean, by posters it played on TV. Ah, you know what I mean.
Lenzi makes a film that may not be a narrative wonder, but if you made a supercut of all its weirdest scenes, you’d find a priest being beaten to death with a crowbar by a witch, a boyfriend chopped into pieces and dumped down a well and a basement where it snows and the daughter becomes a ghost. And maggots!
“You have to have maggots in this sauce,” screaming Lenzi, mad with cooking energy in the kitchen.
This movie is also called Ghosthouse 4 and for that I love it sixteen times as much.
Yes, if you’re going to watch one Bollywood Freddy movie — hello Mahakaal — you should watch another.
This movie is a mess, but it’s also a buffet of the first three A Nightmare on Elm Street films all at once with many of the best kills being redone on a much smaller budget.
This one is about Ranjit, a stalker who gets put in a mental asylum after he won’t leave some teens alone, and one of them — Rekha — hates him so much that it gives him the supernatural power to ruin lives. After nearly being strangled in a game of tug of war, the kids toss the nascent ek hajaar paagalon ka kameena beta into a campfire, so the kids do the right thing and hide the body becauseI Know What You Did Last Summer wouldn’t come out in India for 8 years.
Watching Bollywood versions of your favorite films takes some getting used to, as this starts with nearly an hour of stalking and courtroom drama before suddenly becoming a greatest hits package, along with not funny at all comedy filler and multiple song and dance numbers, all so that the running time is so long you really could have watched all the movies that it was inspired by — ripped off — in the same time.
One night at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, the nurses and doctors throw a party, but you just know that that dude with the darkest eyes, the devil’s eyes, is going to show up, right?
But what if Jason Vorhees showed up?
And what if Leatherface came over?
Then a zombie looking for a copy of the original film in this series?
Sure.
It’s wild, because these guys seem absolutely unhinged compared to the ways they’ve killed before. Leatherface saws off a woman’s leg and beats her to death with it. Jason pours acid in a guy’s face. And then Michael does everything from scissor stabbing to shoving a broken bottle in a woman’s face. He saves his best or grossest or most creative kill when his BM gets ruined when a victim wonders in, so The Shape drowns the guy in the brownest of water.
Then everyone raps.
There’s no way this movie isn’t better than Halloween Kills.
Toni Daniels doesn’t want to write the same college newspaper stories as everyone else at Tambler College. Luckily for her — or maybe not — there’s been a series of on-campus disappearances and at least one murder, all connected to Rush Week (and that one murder connected to a nude modeling session inside the science building that had to be for the infamous “foreign investors”).
Rush Week came way late to the slasher boom and as such has been forgotten. Leave it to the maniacs at Vinegar Syndrome to find it, fix it up and then explain to us just why it has merit. One of the joys of this movie is that it springs major music surprises on you, like The Dickies showing up and a random Gregg Allman cameo as a character named Cosmo Kincaid.
There’s also some star power with Roy Thinnes as Dean Grail and Kathleen Kinmont, who was in Bride of the Re-Animator and Halloween 4 as Kelly Meeker, makes an appearance.
This movie straddles the line of giallo and slasher, not for any artistic merit, but for the m.o. of its killer, who wants to purify the college of all of the sinful women who keep taking nude modeling jobs and posing in the buff in lecture halls. What Have They Done with Your Daughters?
Director Bob Bralver is mostly known for his stunt work, but he’s directed plenty of TV — The A-Team, Riptide, Knight Rider — and also made American Ninja 5 and Midnight. You may be forgiven if you think that this resembles a TV movie, as it’s relatively bloodless, but it replaces any viscera with more nude flesh than several films — if that’s your thing. I mean, you’re reading our site so it probably is.
The Tall Grass Country Club is a gorgeous piece of heaven on Earth, but just like Amity, once a major tourist event starts happening, it doesn’t matter how many dead bodies show up. Things will proceed according to schedule. Except that instead of a great white, Tall Grass is dealing with, well, a possessed lawnmower.
I got past the Troma logo at the beginning — their cityscape and jingle have made me rage quit many a film — and am glad I did. Blades is an adorable film if your definition of adorable means that people are repeatedly torn to shreds by landscaping equipment gone wrong.
This is the kind of movie that can get away with the tagline “Just when you thought it was safe to putt.” And the closing credits set up a sequel that never came: Hedges. “Just when you thought it was safe to trim.”
Blades was written by the same man who wrote and directed Girl School Screamers, John P. Finnegan. That should give you a little fair warning of what you’re in for.
Bobbi Young AKA David DeFalco* co-wrote and stars in this movie, which was shot in the metal bars — “The Living Room” — of Province, Rhode Island. Research has shown me that Bill Conti — yes, the man who wrote the song that Rocky runs up the steps to — as well as Blu Cantrell, Combustible Edison, Deer Tick, Jeffrey Osbourne, Six Finger Satellite and Throwing Muses may come from the Renaissance City, but very few hair metal bands (and yes, I realize Vital Remains and The Body are from there, but they are very far removed from the music in this movie).
The movie is all about Bobbi killing women he picks up in nightclubs, but also video effects. It’s the kind of movie that George Lucas might say of, “Maybe you shouldn’t use so many of those transitions.”
This is the kind of movie where the budget did not include cops and emergency crews, so according to an interview from Kotaku Australia, the production got someone to actually call 911 for the end of the movie.
The article goes on to explain that the sledgehammer kill that is so brutal in this movie also nearly killed the girl in the scene doing it, as DeFalco didn’t understand that he had to hit the styrofoam head and missed his mark by 5 inches, striking the actress directly in the head with the wooden handle and knocking her out.
You know, my cousin made a Shot On Video movie once and my grandmother made us all sit down and watch it. She beamed with pride the entire time the film played, which was mostly an endless scene of a drunk old man screaming and not letting the story go on, as they had to shoot in one of his friend’s houses. Then, my cousin’s character killed his girlfriend and had sex with her, but his character had VD, so he ripped off a condom and it was filled with blood.
“I’m so proud of you,” my grandmother said.
Heavy Metal Massacre is somehow worse than that movie.
*Oh man — DeFalco was also once a pro wrestler and on his 2005 film Chaos, he had an extra scene called “Inside the Coroner’s Office: A Tour of the L.A. Coroner’s Crypt” where he walks around the mortuary and talks about Los Angeles’ most disturbing crimes with technician Michael Cormier, who later died from massive organ failure in what has been said to be a conspiracy related to the Obama administration.
On the site Awesome for Awesome’s Sake, the video is said to be “17 minutes of a greased up, shirtless Dave “The Demon” DeFalco (the writer/director of Chaos) flexing and ranting (wrestler style) about how brutal the world (and his movie) is and how much Roger Ebert sucks…in front of real dead bodies (wrapped in plastic)!”
Then, Cormier “walks us through the various crypts pointing out all sorts of stuff, like dead babies (wrapped in plastic) and dead fat people (wrapped in plastic)!”
This is followed by DeFalco and Cormier discuss their new project The Devil’s Doorway, in which their theory of how meth “opens up a doorway to another dimension allowing demons to possess these meth-heads and then these possessed speed freaks commit brutal crimes!”
Here’s the link that I found on YouTube about it. Any time I think I still can’t be stunned about movies, something amazing comes my way.
So yeah. Cormier died right around the same time as Andrew Breitbart in very much the same way. He ingested arsenic 24 to 48 hours before his death and it’s never come out as to why.
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