Spaulding Osbourne is a super-wealthy businessman played by Duncan Regehr, who you may know as Dracula from The Monster Squad. He’s come to Los Angeles with a crossbow, a penchant for murdering call girls and the need to paint his face as well as a South American symbol in their blood. His next victim might be Sharon (Shanna Reed), a news reporter on his trail, but not if her ex-husband, Sgt. Dan Jefferson (Robert Forster) can help it.
You read that right. In an American Giallo, Robert Forster is hunting the hunter in the urban jungle. This doesn’t stop there with the wild casting, as Richard Roundtree plays Dan’s captain, and Jeff Conaway and Leif Garrett appear as the pimps who supply Osbourne with the sex workers he needs for his laser-sighted Most Dangerous Game.
Directed by Willaim Web, who also made the beloved Party Line — at the same time! — and written by Dana Augustine and Richard Brandes (Devil In the Flesh), this starts with a Teri Weigel sex scene, which was definitely for the foreign investors.
Forster is the whole reason I watch this. His character has crawled into a bottle since his wife left. He doesn’t have a house. Instead, he lives in his nephew’s treehouse. And he’s mad at everyone around him. This is only topped by the killer’s rituals, which include painting up while watching an entire wall of TVs playing footage of volcanos and sharks.
This isn’t great, but it’s perfect if you watch it before the drunken blackout in the hours between pure darkness and early light.
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.
Brian Yuzna produced Re-Animator, but didn’t direct his own film until this body horror comedy which took three years to be released. It’s blessed with special effects by Japanese FX master Screaming Mad George that are really the star of the film.
Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock, son of the best Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) has a great life. His family is rich, he’s popular, he has a new Jeep and a hot cheerleader girlfriend. Yet he doesn’t feel that he fits into high society. This feeling gets worse when his sister’s ex-boyfriend gives him an audio tape of his family engaging in a murderous sex act.
Meanwhile, he keeps noticing a mysterious girl named Clarissa (she masturbates in front of him at a pep rally in a scene that’s frankly sexual in a mainstream non-sex film) and falls for her, despite her hair eating mother. If you’ve noticed that Society may be a completely insane movie, you’re right.
Of course, it turns out that the rich are aliens and Billy’s family is incestual and all of the most well-to-do folks in town are part of a ritual called the shunting, where they suck the life out of poor people. So how do you beat an alien like that? Well, you fist him and pull his asshole inside out, that’s how.
While some of this was based on a project that Yuzna started with Dan O’Bannon, writer Woody Keith claims to have based it on real people that he knew in the Beverly Hills. Gulp.
For fans of Halloween 2, that’s the exact same hospital that was Haddonfield Memorial. So there’s another reason to watch this again.
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.
I can honestly say that this movie changed my life and the way that I experience film. I found it at Something Weird Video, a Pittsburgh store that had many movies that did the same for many people. My brother and I must have watched this every night for months, obsessing over the gunplay and the honor-bound Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), who must do one last kill to save the sight of a woman he blinded, Jennie (Sally Yeh). It was unlike anything we’d ever seen, nearly an Italian Western in Hong Kong, a place where cops like Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) can discover that he has as much in common with a criminal than his fellow police officers.
In The Killer, man’s laws don’t matter. What does is the brotherhood that can be built between two men. What matters is the fact that you are responsible for your mistakes, that a child’s life is worth nearly being killed or arrested, that you can show people mercy even after they’ve tried to have you murdered. Movies would change after this, as Hong Kong started making more ballet-like gun violence films, a style that made its way here before director John Woo followed, starting with the JCVD movie Hard Target before making blockbusters like Mission: Impossible 2.
The first time I saw a church filled with broken plaster and bullet casings and doves flying all around, I had one of those moments where I knew that I would never have this experience again. It was like trying a drug for the first time, the rush of a first kiss, holding someone’s hand. My heart started to race and I knew that I had to keep chasing this feeling.
Producer Tsui Hark was extremely unhappy with this film and planned on recutting it, making Li Ying the hero instead of Ah Jong. The schedule to make this was tight and Woo and editor David Wu never were going to make these cuts. Hark didn’t have time and it was such a big success that it enraged Hark, who is said to have starting tossing things out of his office window when he found out.
Woo had a higher aim than most Hong Kong action movies, which are often content to rip off American movies. This was dedicated to Martin Scorsese and inspired by Mean Streets. There’s also a lot of Leone and the movie Le Samouraï in The Killer.
Yet when this first played in the U.S., it was badly subtitled and sold as an action comedy.
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.
On the bonus discs 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 release, you’ll find examples of several shorts that played at the theater. You can buy this from Severin.
Divide and Rule – Never! (1978): Made for and by young people, this forty-minute or so film looks at race and how it is viewed in school, at work and by the law. There are also some historic sequences of British imperialism and a discussion of how Germany got to the point that it was pre-World War II, plus plenty of punk rock and reggae. This has many sides represented, from Black and Asian immigrants to ex-National Front members.
Divide and Rule — Never! was distributed by The Other Cinema, a non-profit-making, independent film distribution company in London.
Sadly, so much of this movie — made 45 years ago — are just as relevant today in America. This is movie that doesn’t shy away from incendiary material, but that’s what makes it so powerful. In addition to the interviews, it has some interesting animation and a soundtrack with Steel Pulse, TRB, X-Ray Specs and The Clash.
Dead Cat (1989): Directed and written by Davis Lewis, this has Genesis P-Orridge in the cast and a soundtrack by Psychic TV, which has been released as Kondole/Dead Cat.
A boy (Nick Patrick) has a cat that dies and his grief deposits him into a psychosexual nightmare, including a medicine man (Derek Jarman) and several unhoused people (P-Orridge, Andrew Tiernan).
This was shown at only a few theaters the year it was release — including Scala Cinema — before fading away and almost being lost before Lewis found it. In the program for this film, Scala said “The torture that occurs at the transition of sexuality.” If you liked videos for bands liek Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, this feels like the inspiration.
The Mark of Lilith (1986): Directed by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin and Zachary Nataf as a project at The London College of Printing, this is all about Zena (Pamela Lofton), who is researching monstrous women. She meets Lillia (Susan Franklyn) a vampire, at a horror movie and the two start a relationship.
Liliana, trapped with an abusive male partner by the name of Luke (Jeremy Peters) who is what vampires probably would be, scavengers who feed on the weak, dreams of movies in which she is the victim of just such a vampire. She’s often fed on human beings, but has been careful not to be caught or make a mess, unlike her partner. As for Zena, she’s been studying how female gods were once worshipped but now only appear in horror fiction as monstrous creatures.
So much of this movie is as right on now as when it was made, like the speech that Zena gives when Liliana tracks her down: “Have you noticed that horror can be the most progressive popular genre? It brings up everything that our society represses, how the oppressed are turned into a source of fear and anxiety. The horror genre dramatizes the repressed as “the other” in the figure of the monster and normal life is threatened by the monster, by the return of the repressed consciously perceived as ugly, terrible, obscene.”
Her argument is that we can subvert the very notions of horror, making the monsters into heroes that destroy the rules that hold us down.
However, this being a student film, it’s very overly earnest and instead of working these ideas into the narrative as subtext, they take over the entire movie. If you’re willing to overlook this, it’s a pretty fascinating effort.
Relax (1991): Steve (Philip Rosch) lives with his lover Ned (Grant Oatley), but as he starts to engage in a more domestic relationship, he starts to worry about all of the partners he’s had. After all, the AIDS crisis is happening and he’s never been tested. Ned tells him to relax, but there’s no way that he can.
The wait for the test is just five days but it may as well be forever. This also makes a tie between sex and death, as Steve strips for both Ned and his doctor. And in the middle of this endless period of limbo, he dreams of death and fights with Ned, who just smiles and keeps telling him to relax. But how could anyone during the time of AIDS?
I remember my first blood test and the doctor lecturing me after he gave it, telling me that I should have been a virgin until I married and whatever happened, I brought it on myself. The funny thing was, I had been a virgin, I thought I was getting married and I had no knowledge that my fiance was unfaithful to a level you only see in films. That night, my parents came to visit, leaving their small town to come to the big city and my mother asked, “What is that bandage on your arm?” I could have lied, but I told her it was for a blood test, and I dealt with yet someone else upset with me. My problems were miniscule in the face of the recriminations that gay people had to deal with, a time of Silence=Death, a place seemingly forgotten today other than by the ones who fought the war.
Directed and written by Chris Newby, this is a stark reminder of that time.
Boobs a Lot (1968): Directed by Aggy Read, this is quite simple: many shots of female breasts, all set to The Fugs’ song of the same name. Banned in Australia, this has around three thousand sets of mammaries all in three minutes, the male gaze presented over and over and, yes, over again until it goes past just being sophomoric and becomes mesmerizing in the way that breasts are when you’re starting puberty. I’m ascribing artistic meaning to this but really, at the end of the day, it’s just a lot of sweater meat. Fun bags. Cans, dirty pillows, babylons, what have you. My wife is always amazed at how many dumb names I can come up with for anatomy and I blame years of John Waters and reading Hustler as a kid and yeah, I’m not as proud of the latter than the former. That said, there are a lot of headlights in this one.
Kama Sutra Rides Again (1971): Stanley (Bob Godfrey, who also directed and write this) and Ethel are a married couple looking to keep their love life interesting, so they have been trying out new positions. Things start somewhat simple, but by the end, Ethel is being dropped through trap doors and out of an airplane onto her husband. A trapeze love making attempt ends in injury, leading Ethel to chase Stanley while all wrapped up.
Stanley Kubrick personally selected this film to play before A Clockwork Orange in theaters in the UK. I wonder if this played at Scala before the screening that shut down the theater. More than just a dirty cartoon, this was nominated for an Oscar. Despite being about lovemaking, it’s all rather innocent and remains funny years after it was made.
Coping With Cupid (1991): Directed and co-written by former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, this finds three blonde alien women — played by Yolande Brener, Fiona Dennison and Melissa Milo — who have come to Earth to learn what love is, under the command of Captain Trulove (the voice of Lorelei King). They meet a man named Peter (Sean Pertwee), who hasn’t found anyone, as well as interview people on the street to try and learn exactly how one person can become enamored of another.
On Guard (1984): Sydney: Four women — Diana (Jan Cornall), Amelia (Liddy Clark), Adrienne (Kerry Dwyer) and Georgia (Mystery Carnage) — juggle their lives, careers and even families to destroy the research of the company Utero, who are creating new ways of reproductive engineering. Or, as the sales material says, “Not only are the protagonists politically active women, but the frank depiction of their sexual and emotional lives and the complexity of their domestic responsibilities add new dimensions to the thriller format. The film also raises as a central issue the ethical debate over biotechnology as a potential threat to women and their rights to self-determination.”
One of the women loses the diary that has all of the information on their mission, which leads to everyone getting tense over what they’re about to do. Directed by Susan Lambert, who wrote it with Sarah Gibson, this allows the women to be heroes and not someone to be saved. I like that the advertising promised that this was “A Girls’ Own Adventure” and a heist film, hiding the fact that it has plenty of big ideas inside it.
Today, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is an accepted way of having children, yet here, it’s presented as something that will take away one of the primary roles of women. Juxtapose that with IVF being one of the women-centric voting topics of the last U.S. election.
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.
I first encountered Sante Sangre at Prime Time Video in Ellwood City, the video store of my childhood. For some reason, it was stocked in the horror section. I have no idea where I’d put the film myself, but it felt like horror was often the catchall for the films that were not understood. And, of course, as I grew up in a very small town between Pittsburgh and Youngstown, no one was going to rent anything out of a foreign section. As such, amongst the gorehounds of home, Sante Sangre was a film that was too odd, too strange and ultimately not violent enough to appease our needs. I’d never rented it and now, an old man who worships at the foot of The Holy Mountain, I find myself wishing that I could send a message back to my younger self and tell him to seek this film out.
Interestingly enough, this film was written by Roberto Leoni, who had worked in the library of a psychiatric hospital which inspired this film. Leoni also wrote My Dear Killer, Casablanca Express and one of the oddest movies I’ve ever seen, Sergio Martino’s American Rickshaw.
He brought the script to Claudio Argento, who felt that Alejandro Jodorowsky was the only director who could make this movie. However, after Duneended due to money issues and Tusk was considered a failure, Jodorowsky had disappeared. The director would only meet Leoni, telling him that the angel of stories had passed over Paris and taken this story to Italy, but it was meant for him to tell.
After all, Jodorowsky had had a chance meeting in the alley outside a bar with Gregorio Cardenas Hernandez, the famed Estrangulador de Tacuba who had emerged after nearly thirty years in prison able to play the piano, write poetry, practice law and with a wife and four children. He was pardoned of his crimes and led a normal, if famous, life until his death in 1999.
Fenix, played at different times by Jodorowsky’s sons Axel and Adan, has grown up in the circus, the child of Orgo the knife-thrower and Concha the trapeze artist. His mother is also the leader of a cult that worships a dead child who was raped and had her arms cut off by two brothers. As the Catholic church and the government destroy their place of worship, Orgo is making love to the tattooed woman who he performs alongside. Concha catches him, but is hypnotized and raped as well.
As if that isn’t bad enough, the beloved elephant dies despite Fenix’s prayers. He watches as scavengers tear it apart in the city dump and all his father can do is carve up his chest with a tattoo to try to stop his tears and make him a man.
That night, Concha finally rises up against Orgo, burning his privates with acid. He retaliates by cutting off her arms before slicing his own throat, unable to live without his sexual member. The tattooed woman takes the mute Alma — who Fenix already loves — and runs off into the bloody night.
We move back to the present, where the film began with Fenix in a mental institution. A chance outing reveals to him that the tattooed woman is still alive and trying to introduce Alma to a life of selling her body. That night, a strange woman kills the older inked female, but we can’t see who it is.
We soon learn that Concha is forcing Fenix to be her arms — not just in their knife throwing act, which forces him to become a strange substitute for his father — but in a series of murders. Alma tries to get Fenix to leave this all behind, but his mother demands that he kills the only woman he has ever loved. He responds by stabbing her, yet she does not die.
That’s when we learn the truth. Concha has been dead since the night Orgo took her arms all those years ago and an armless mannequin has been the one that our hero — such as it is — has been listening to. Along with the help of more imaginary friends, Fenix destroys the past and surrenders to the police, amazed that he has regained control of his arms once again.
As the elephant dies in this film, inspiration was born. In Eddie Murphy’s song “Whazupwitu,” everything begins with the words of the clown: “The elephant is dying.” This is not the last time Murphy would mention the director’s work, as he often brought him up while he did press for Dolemite Is My Name.
I am also amused that beyond Argento’s brother producing this — and by osmosis some of the murder scenes feeling as if they are inspired by Dario — Rene Cardona Jr. (yes, the director of Tintorera) was also a producer.
Even after several watches of this film, I am still astounded by its rich palette of colors, the way it synthesizes references from Universal’s Invisible Man to the lucha movies of Mexico’s past and how the hero is the villain while also being pure of heart, despite the many murders he has committed.
Perhaps in my teenage years, I was not yet ready for the psychomagic cocktail that a teacher like Jodorowsky was shaking up with this film. Yet today, I can definitely tell you that it has my highest recommendation. Please watch it. I’d love to discuss it with you.
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.
From writer/director Lamberto Bava comes a modern-day reimagining of his father’s classic Black Sunday! also known as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil, this is scanned in 2K from the original camera negative for the first time ever in North America and has an interview with Bava.
The sale will take place from 12:01am EST on 11/29 to 11:59pm PST on 12/2 at Severin’s site.
A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michele Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from any movies in the Demonsseries. Soon, they find a metal mask — whoops, this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around, it causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they discover an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides that this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments of her revenge.
Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not also remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it?
That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, often reading it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he chose Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.
Davide is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancee Klaus Kinski here) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?
There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. Well, you get what you want, trust me. Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman as the demonic form of Anibas.
Man, what a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old tears and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws while she spits white fluid all over him. Oh yeah — she also has the facial scars that Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s version.
This is a hard movie to review, as you have to compare it one of the greatest movies ever made. Even Lamberto, I think, would admit that his father remains the best director. But his son tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sundayis the kind of film that’s going to live forever. Lamberto was able to create some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Maskand did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sectand Cemetery Man.
It even has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.
It’s entertaining, as all Italian late in the game horror is to me. And that’s enough to recommend it to you.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1980s
Ad un passo dall’aurora (One Step Away from Dawn) is based on the book Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler and is about a rich surgeon, married to a beautiful woman, who seeks new and more erotic experiences outside of his marriage and wait, this is the same story as Eyes Wide Shut, except instead of Stanley Kubrick directing, it has Mark B. Light. Of course, that’s Mario Bianchi, the man who helmed Kill the Poker Player, the “Lucio Fulci Presents” films Sodoma’s Ghost and The Murder Secret and Satan’s Baby Doll, After this movie, he’d spend most of the next decade making adult films as Nicholas Moore, Tony Yanker and Martin White, including the scenes that would make up the 2001 compilation movie John Holmes vs. Ilona Staller.
That said, even though so much of Bianchi’s career was in actual dirty movies and this is a movie about sex, this is somewhat chaste. I mean, yes, it has a female masturbation scene, but the orgy that is at the center of the story feels like a sex party from a TV movie.
Riccardo Varchi (Gerardo Amato) is a cardiologist who becomes obsessed with a sex worker named Lù (Tinì Cansino, who I am as well already obsessed over as she was Arabella: Black Angel) and attends the aforementioned orgy, where he’s soon blackmailed.
This is not the only Italian film inspired by the same story. 1982’s Il cavaliere, la morte e il diavolo (The Knight, Death and the Devil), directed by Beppe Cino (La Casa del Buon Ritorno), is also an adaption and adds a punk girl to the tale.
I love that Stanley Kubrick probably watched this to get ready to make his movie. He probably did more takes of one scene that Bianchi did in this entire movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.
There’s no way that the Gahan Wilson that wrote this movie is the Gahan Wilson who drew all those cartoons for Playboy, right?
Because if he is, then this is a comedy and this movie makes a lot more sense.
And if not, then I have no idea what the filmmakers were going for in this one.
So after this movie completely rips off the open of Piecesand Nightmare, we move to an asylum where the inmates are being given cigarettes as some form of therapy. One of them escapes and kills everyone in his way and that’s Arthur (James Jude Courtney, who would go on to be The Shape in the 2018 Halloween). He nearly kills an actress named Linda (Loren Winters, who was a one and done actress in this, along with producing the film), whose experience ends up getting her cast in a cheesy science fiction movie called Astronette that will use her notoriety for publicity.
There’s no way Arthur would hunt her down, right?
I have so many questions for this movie. How did they get Robbie Krieger from The Doors to write the theme song? Why did they have Linda’s boyfriend cheat on her and suddenly become a sympathetic hero in the last act? Why is there no real freeway in this movie? Why does Arthur howl at the moon? Why is some of this movie well-shot with decent stunts and other portions have the worst acting you’ve ever seen? Are you surprised that this was released by Cannon — well, released on VHS in the Netherlands by Cannon Screen Entertainment, so not really produced by Cannon.
There’s not really another slasher like The Freeway Maniac. It’s…something else.
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