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A mad journey into the mind of the depraved!

A mad journey into the mind of the depraved!
Recommended for devolved primates only!

Sunday, March 31, 2013

ROLLS ROYCE BABY (1975)




 If you enjoy looking at Lina Romay's vagina this is the film for you. It all starts out with some explicit pussy shaving and goes on from there into the sex-filled world of our titular character.  She bangs an old fat truck-driver, a naked kung-fu guy, a baby-faced fellow and a couple of other generic folks in between diddling herself. There's really no plot here and this plays as close to being a hardcore porn as you can get minus the cumshots and graphic penetration scenes. Good viewing for anyone really into seeing Romay play a nympho and that's about it.
 I think every other film I've ever seen Romay in was directed by the great Jess Franco. This one is done by Erwin C. Dietrich who was a producer on many of Franco's films so it has exactly the same feel to it.



Wednesday, March 27, 2013

IN HOT BLOOD (1968)



 A young gal decides to be a nudie model and from there it turns into a life of drugs, sex parties(where some really fake-looking whipping goes on and people use whipped-cream as a lube)and wanton lesbianism. The lesbian scenes are pretty funny and consist of ice-cubes being rubbed on nipples, boobs being jiggled and bathtub-frolicking. This film takes a hard left turn at the end and we get a meat-cleaver massacre where a hand gets chopped off out of the blue. Luckily it's a pretty short film since most of these allegedly titillating scenes go on for way too long. Check it out if you dig full-figured 60's gals fellating bananas or just bouncy black & white boobs and jazz music.


 


Tuesday, March 26, 2013

THE HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER MEETS THE SKID ROW SLASHER (1979)


 My favorite movie by director Ray Dennis Steckler has to be THE THRILL KILLERS. After that one there's a big drop-off in quality but Steckler seemed like a nice enough guy who was really into making cheap drive-in fodder so I always give his films a shot even if they mostly disappoint in the excitement department.  This one here is a pretty rough sit. The whole movie is shot silently, Steckler only added sound and voice-over narration after his distributors forced him to, so it's got a bizarre feeling right from the start. The whole film basically consists of two scenes repeated over and over again. "The Hollywood Strangler" goes to see call-girls and unconvincingly chokes them to death, then our female star, "The Skid Row Slasher", slices the necks of some old dirty bums and at the end the title comes true in a not so very spectacular fashion. You do get some boobs and some colorful 70's blood thrown in but it hardly makes up for the slow-pace and repetitious scenes. Luckily I own this on a DVD with commentary by Joe Bob Briggs which makes it way more entertaining.
 Supposedly this was found in mass-murderer Ted Bundy's personal movie collection so I guess check it out if you're a very forgiving serial killer or crap movie fan or both.


Monday, March 25, 2013

BLACK MAGIC (1975)


 Sort of similar to the later, crazier BOXER'S OMEN this is a Hong Kong horror flick with lots of bat-shit crazy elements concerning a couple of magicians battling it out and people getting voodoo spells put on them. The Shaw Brothers are mainly known for their classic kung fu flicks which I've always loved but their horror stuff is equally awesome and even crazier.  They had previous scare films but this is the one that most people credit with getting the ball rolling on these more gory exploitation films. This one has worms burrowing under a ladies skin, a guy drinking giant centipede soup, corpse defiling, heads being chopped off then burned and all kinds of nuttiness. There's a climactic laser-beam/magical battle between our two magical men and the Shaws were even nice enough to throw some gratuitous naked gals into the mix making everyone a winner!  Come for the horror but stay for the lactating tits and rice shoved into vaginas!
 This was a big hit in Hong Kong so BLACK MAGIC 2 came out the following year, there's an Indonesian film(THE QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC) that they retitled BLACK MAGIC 3, BOXER'S OMEN was alternately known as BLACK MAGIC 4, SEEDING OF A GHOST was BLACK MAGIC 5 and I have no idea if anything was retitled to PART 6 but it's seems very possible.







SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST (1974)


 Sex, violence and body fluids. When you think of the nunsploitation genre you would probably think of Italy first and other European countries next but this here film is a rare example of a Catholic-nuns-gone-wrong tale from Japan and I would put it up there among the best Eurotrash naughty nun films as a look at the evils of organized religion. It starts out with a hockey match, which is another one of the last things I ever thought I would see in an Asian film and from there it tells the tale of a young gal who's sent off to become a nun instead of going to an insane asylum. One of my favorite things about this movie, besides the ample nudity on display, is the way it thematically runs the gamut from serious drama featuring photos from Nagasaki after the atomic bombing to THREE STOOGES-like slapstick to bondage reel to beautiful art film to horrific horror film complete with a secret trap-door and acid bath. They jam so much into one movie that it's hard not to at least appreciate the effort. In this way I think it even tops most of the similar European nun flicks by adding those extra-insane Japanese elements. If you don't care about any of that stuff it still has hot nude Japanese gals being whipped with roses, nun wrestling, a rapist priest and Christ getting pissed on. Hard to go wrong with all that. AKA CONVENT OF THE SACRED BEAST

Sunday, March 24, 2013

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)


 Based on the gore content alone this might be the greatest Bigfoot movie ever made! If you took your typical Bigfoot on the loose flick and threw in a creature that rips intestines out of people, hacks them with axes, spears them with a pitchfork, pulls off arms, rapes women, kills girl-scouts and is just an all-around surly bastard you would get this. In the big standout scene our angry monster even rips a guys cock off while he's taking a piss! That's one mean son-of-a-bitch there! There's also a weird bit with some backwoods folks who worship our hairy monster and sacrifice women to him. While not a very well-made film, the music score sounds like it's lifted from a SESAME STREET skit and for some reason they shoot the big super-violent attack scene at the end in super-slow-motion which is pretty dumb, the movie is overall a good watch for horror junkies looking for something a bit insane and it definitely never falls into that extremely boring area that some of the earlier, documentary-style, 70's Bigfoot films do.

MURDER ROCK (1984)


 You might think that a movie named MURDER ROCK would have some rock music in it. Unfortunately, in this case, you would be completely wrong. This was pretty much the start of Lucio Fulci directing really crappy horror films up until he died, which is a shame because his earlier 80's films are some of my favorite gore masterpieces. You might also think a movie from a guy known as "The Godfather Of Gore" might have thrown a few gruesome kills into this giallo-esque story of a black-gloved killer but again you would be wrong here. Your killer here prefers to chloroform his victims and then stick a hatpin into them which might be one of the most boring un-cinematic ways to kill someone besides maybe just choking them or bonking them on the head with a club. This one is all-around disappointing for gore-hounds looking for a fix or giallo fans looking for an interesting plot. On the plus side if you enjoy spandex-clad female asses and homages to the movie FLASHDANCE(one of the alternate titles for this is, appropriately enough, SLASHDANCE) this might work for you, otherwise not so great. AKA THE DEMON IS LOOSE & DANCING DEATH

This movie even makes a shitty music video!:

Saturday, March 23, 2013

CHALLENGE TO WHITE FANG (1974)


 This is the second of the Lucio Fulci-directed White Fang films. This one features Franco Nero in the main role and Donald(DR. BUTCHER, M.D.) O'Brien shows up in a small part. Naturally the real star is White Fang who according to this film hates people who cheat at poker. Apparently these were pretty popular movies in Italy at the time cuz they made a bunch of them. The weirdest thing is that these are kid's films featuring a little boy and a dog but they also contain lots of violence. This one has an old guy who loses his legs and then gets burnt alive, a couple of Indians who gets massacred for their sled and other various killings. Also our titular dog hero suffers through some eye-violence thanks to some asshole killer bird(this, of course, being something Fulci would become famous for later on in his career thanks to ZOMBIE). I'm pretty sure this is not something you would see in any modern-day Disney movies.
  The other thing about these movies is that they love throwing them on spaghetti-western box-sets even though they're not really westerns but I guess as long as you thrown in at least one barroom brawl it narrowly qualifies. AKA THE RETURN OF WHITE FANG



Wednesday, March 20, 2013

ONE DAMNED DAY AT DAWN...DJANGO MEETS SARTANA! (1970)


 This is a pretty unremarkable and forgettable spaghetti-western. It hits all the basic notes, there's a gang of bad Mexicans, an older gunslinger shows up to help out a younger fellow, there's a few big showdowns and in between this there's a lot of talky bits. Of course this has nothing to do with the original Django or Sartana characters. The two leads here are pretty different. Django is basically just a bounty hunter and Sartana is a guy who becomes sheriff of a town but is mostly incompetent in that role so Django helps him out.  No coffin dragging or Gatling gun action on display.   

DJANGO, KILL!: IF YOU LIVE SHOOT! (1967)


 Finally got a chance to see the uncut version of this spaghetti-western classic.  One of the big differences is an ultra-bloody scalping scene that I don't recall in the English version.  This has always been one of my favorites in this genre just because of the weird elements they throw into it.  You get an openly homosexual gang of black-clad, stylishly-dressed villains led by a guy named Zorro who kidnap a young boy and make goo-goo eyes at him. Our hero, played by Tomas Milian(who's not actually called Django) uses solid gold bullets, so we get a scene where a guy is ripped apart after being shot up to get to the gold(this is also more graphic in the longer cut).  If that's not weird enough you also get an alcoholic parrot and a bit where Milian is tortured by iguanas and vampire bats, which is a pretty odd idea. Also there's Indian characters which you don't see in a lot of spaghetti-westerns. Director Giulio Questi would go on to make the equally strange giallo DEATH LAID AN EGG.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

WITCHCRAFT: EVIL ENCOUNTERS (1988)


 This is an Italian gore flick with actual American stars in it, which by 1988 was a pretty rare thing to see. Also as the 80's went on the quality of movies in general from Italy got worse and worse for the most part. This one here is no exception. Ghost stories where random things happen for no explainable reason are probably my least favorite genre and this fits right into that shitty category even though I guess it's technically witches making stuff happen in this case but they might as well be ghosts since that's how they act. If you're just looking for some gory set-pieces though you do find them here. A lady gets shoved down a chimney, has her mouth shown shut and gets burned alive, another gal gets speared on a swordfish in the most ridiculous murder, a guy gets crucified upside down and set on fire and that sort of thing goes on throughout. It's too bad it's all completely stupid, pointless and worst of all even with all the bloody killing going on it's boring. Also there's an annoying little boy which is never a good thing in a movie like this. Produced by euro-cult film master Joe D'Amato. How he got Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff to be in this I have no idea but even with them I don't think this ever got much of a release theatrically in the U.S. The DVD I have of this calls it WITCHERY on the box but WITCHCRAFT on the film itself and in England this is known as GHOSTHOUSE 2, in Italy this somehow became a sequel to the EVIL DEAD movies being called LA CASA 4(EVIL DEAD & EVIL DEAD 2 are LA CASA & LA CASA 2 & LA CASA 3 is the original title of GHOSTHOUSE) confused yet? There was also a LA CASA 5 in 1990 which is also known as BEYOND DARKNESS. I haven't seen any of these later LA CASA movies but if they're like this one they're probably skippable.

WET WILDERNESS (1975)


 If you can imagine a hardcore 70's porn film mixed with a proto-slasher film featuring a guy in a yellow ski-mask with the word "love" written on it in magic marker carrying a large machete and axe offing folks after he cums you get the idea of what this film is. About as basic as you can get with sex scenes followed by violence. Interesting really only as a curiosity piece displaying a genre that appealed to the sleaziest degenerates around back in 70's grind-houses so, of course, I dug it the most! Insane dubbed dialogue, a black character who I think is introduced just so some goofy racism talk can be inserted, there's forced incest and people get whacked with a machete as fake blood is strewn about. What's not to love here? One negative I will say is that the DVD I have of this got rid of the original soundtrack for obvious legal reasons since it featured tunes from JAWS, PSYCHO and TAXI DRIVER. While I understand the necessity for this it would be an amazingly surreal experience to view it this way and would be way better than the stupid moaning and dirge-like music they replaced it with. I think the Alpha Blue Archives release might have this version available. Gotta check into that. Stay sleazy!

YONGARY, MONSTER FROM THE DEEP (1967)


 Korean version of GODZILLA which you think they would have maybe made sooner since the original GODZILLA came out 13 years earlier but whatever. Yongary itself is just Godzilla with a horn on his nose that shoots laser beams. There's a scene where a little boy hits the monster with an itch-ray and he dances a little jig while some 60's surf rock plays. Besides this and few other scenes of dumb rubber-suit monster activities there's not much that makes this any different from your typical GAMERA movie of this era and like those this is equally good for a cheap laugh. This was remade in 2000 as YONGGARY which was released here in the U.S. on DVD as REPTILIAN. Unfortunately it employed a bunch of computer-generated fx and sucked.

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER (1983)

 
 It's hard to believe this movie was made by human beings with the intent that it would be watched by other human beings.  The back-story here is that director Doris Wishman completed the film then a bunch of the footage was lost in the processing so from there she quickly re-shot some scenes and threw a bunch of narration over it.  It's all pretty mind-boggling.  So much information is told to the viewer that your head starts spinning, the editing is also no help in trying to comprehend just what the hell is going on and a few of the characters that actually speak are voiced by the same guy that does the narration! On the plus side at least there's ample bloody kills that take place that show maybe this coulda been a halfway decent slasher flick in it's original form. Porn regular Samantha Fox stars in a rare non sex role(there is, luckily, a little nudity thrown in here and there). The most amazing thing about this is that it was ever finished at all and someone thought it was actually releasable. This one is truly for only the most adventurous of terrible movie fans or insane Doris Wishman completists, I think I might be both of those things.      

Even the trailer is kooky!:

Saturday, March 16, 2013

ISLAND OF THE LOST GIRLS (1969)


 By looking at the poster for this Italian/German exploitation flick you might think it's a sexploitation or women-in-prison sort of a deal but this is actually part of the Kommissar X series which were these James Bond-ish pulpy crime dramas that were popular in Europe in the 60's. This is the 5th in the series and is about women being drugged and turned into prostitutes on a secret island in Asia. You would think with this sleazy premise we'd get a lot of nudity and sex and you do a few peaks at some boobs but not a whole lot.  It's basically filled with the heroics of Kommissar X played by Tony Kendall and his sidekick played by a musclebound Brad Harris who had earlier in his career been in a few Italian Hercules films.  One of the bad guys is portrayed by one of my favorite character actors Herbert Fux from MARK OF THE DEVIL and an angry midget also threatens our heroes.  Basically it's a pretty silly secret agent/spy film which might be of interest to 007 fans.  AKA THREE GOLDEN SERPENTS

Friday, March 15, 2013

THE CANNIBAL MAN (1973)


 This bloody Spanish psychological horror flick starts right out with some slaughterhouse footage of cows being sliced up and drained of their blood.  Whenever I see this I figure we're in for an underlying anti-meat-consuming message which you could easily read into this. From there on we get the tale of a fellow who slowly unravels and becomes a murdering nut-job after accidentally and justifiably killing an asshole cab-driver. I probably would dig this movie a lot more if it wasn't so slowly paced and the title is pretty misleading as well since, as far as I can tell, there isn't any cannibalism going on here at all.  It's alternate, less splashy title of APARTMENT ON THE 13TH FLOOR, and it's original title of WEEK OF THE KILLER, are both a little more accurate in conveying the non-horror elements on display.  Probably a good movie for fans of stuff like HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER but in a more subdued version.

DUCK, YOU SUCKER (1971)


 By this point in his career director Sergio Leone had many profitable hits in America and was getting bigger budgets to work with and you can tell by the massive scale of some of the battles that take place and the gigantic explosions that accompany them in this that most of what he had ended up on the screen. While this isn't anywhere near my favorite Leone western(I can't help but feel that it could have been cast better, the story itself is never all that engaging to me as some of his better known spags and it's a bit overly wacky at times(although this might be a point you could make about most of Leone's works)) it's still an amazingly well made film to look at topped only by ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST for it's beautiful cinematography.  A little long in spots with most cuts of this being well over 2 hours long but still worth watching if you're a film fan of any sort and like big spectacles. AKA A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE

COME DEADLY (1974)


 This one's kind of a sleazy low-budget porn version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  You get a masked rapist strangler in a goofy hat and gardening gloves, lots of bad acting and sex scenes featuring not particularly attractive people.  You don't get any blood thanks to the choking preference of our killer.  The plot is straight from SCOOBY-DOO with a big unmasking at the end.  I picked this up on a double DVD set with a much sleazier and actually bloody horror porn called WET WILDERNESS that delivers the goods way better than this one. On the positive side this is barely an hour long and might give you a chuckle or two but probably not a boner. AKA THE HARDER THEY FALL


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

SLAUGHTER HIGH (1986)


                                  "Talk dirty, Frank! Talk dirty!" "Um... tits"

 If you took FRIDAY THE 13th mixed it with THE TOXIC AVENGER and threw Caroline Munro in there it would seem like a good idea on paper, in reality though I would probably rank this 80's slasher somewhere in the middle of all the many stalk and kill flicks from that decade.  It starts out like your average teen sex comedy and then our nerd character, Marty, gets horribly scarred in a prank gone wrong and from there on out it's exactly what you expect(at least up until the ending when, I think, it may have been all just a dream).  It all takes place on April Fool's Day and that was the original title up until that other APRIL FOOL'S DAY slasher movie came out(the one that had all the fake death's in it and a shitty ending).  This movie here not only resembles FRIDAY THE 13th in plot and bloody kills(a guy's intestine's explode out of his body, a gal takes an acid bath and a guy getting chopped-up by a lawn-mower being some highlights) but they got Harry Manfredini to score it so it sounds pretty much exactly like F13 in a bunch of places and they even go so far as having one character wear a hockey mask at one point and joke around about being Jason. The kills are good and gore-filled(I watched this on an old VHS but I'm pretty sure there's an even gorier DVD release) and this is an OK watch if you dig these type of 80's stupid dead teen flicks. 

DERANGED (1987)


  I can't say I enjoyed this one very much. Directed by Chuck Vincent(who's best known for his porn directing) and with a cast made up of porn performers(Veronica Hart, Jamie Gillis, Jerry Butler) this is a weird psychological-type thriller/horror film with some annoying aspects to it. I generally hate movies where stuff happens in a character's mind and this is what we're shown, I also hate movies where stuff happens that makes no logical sense within the movie and that happens here a lot. Veronica Hart(under her real name Jane Hamilton) acts her ass off in the lead role of a gal who's mentally unhinged and schizophrenic. She's attacked in her apartment by a guy in a ski mask and has a miscarriage which leads to her becoming a murderer. The idea to film this movie from a delusional characters point of view is an interesting one but I don't think they really pulled it off very well. Roman Polanski's REPULSION was obviously a big influence here. I think I'll stick with the 70's Ed Gein-inspired DERANGED over this one.

Dickie-boy just wants some lovin':

HER NAME WAS LISA (1980)


 After LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET director Roger Watkins made a bunch of porn flicks and this one's probably the most well known.  It's a pretty dark tale of a cheap prostitute named Lisa played by Samantha Fox who we first see laying dead at her funeral.  There's a surprising anti-drug message and the whole film is told in flashbacks through various people that knew Lisa including Vanessa Del Rio. It chronicles her downward spiral and is not the most uplifting thing you coulda jerked off to back in 1980. You can tell that Watkins wanted to make something more than just another silly fuck flick and he does.  There's some Led Zeppelin and Kraftwerk tracks among the various borrowed music.  You get some light bondage and a rich guy gets a well-deserved dildo-raping of his ass.  Also one of my personal favorite porn actors Bobby Astyr(who in real life was married to Fox) shows up in a typically goofy role as a scumbag who gets a little rapey.  This is a must see for fans of the era when porn mattered.



Monday, March 11, 2013

THE GLORY STOMPERS (1967)


 The Glory Stompers are a biker gang in this film but not the main gang, that would be The Black Souls.  They are led by Dennis Hopper in full-on bad guy mode and they also have Casey Kasem from America's Top 40 and a large muscular fellow named Magoo who looks like a white version of Bolo Yeung in the group.  This guy, Robert Tessier would later go on to shave his head and battle Charles Bronson in HARD TIMES.
 The plot concerns the kidnapping of one of the Glory Stomper's old ladies and they're quest to get her back before she's sold off into a life of drug-addiction and prostitution to the Mexicans. It's full of the usual biker flick hijinks(drinking, molesting women, hippie pot parties etc.) and it's a decent watch with a groovy soundtrack.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

FEROCIOUS BEAST WITH A GUN (1977)

                                                    "Have a drink twat!"

 Italian crime thriller with Helmut Berger playing a psycho rapist/murderer who escapes from jail and along with his gang of subservient cohorts goes on a robbery spree. Marisa Mell from DANGER:DIABOLIK gets caught up in the criminal festivities and supplies some nice nudity to go along with all the gun-play on display. A young gal gets her chest sliced up with a straight razor and a guy gets buried alive and covered with lime in a few of the more violence-filled scenes. This film has a pretty sweet soundtrack and is worth a look if you dig those European cops and criminal-type films. This film shows up on a TV in JACKIE BROWN so I assume Tarantino is a fan. AKA's= MAD DOG KILLER, BEAST WITH A GUN, STREET KILLERS, FEROCIOUS, THE HUMAN BEAST and probably a few more.

"read the paper!":




A SMELL OF HONEY, A SWALLOW OF BRINE (1966)

      "I'm such a bitch." "We all are. But that's just part of being female I guess."                 

This 60's sexploitation flick starts right out with an attempted date-rape scene and stays pretty sleazy throughout.  This is sort of the dirty-movie version of the boy who cried wolf except it's the gal who cried rape.  And just like the above quote reinforces she's a real bitchy character and a total tease to everyone before getting her kicks by ruining the lives of every fellow she meets.  By the end of the film she meets up with an actual rapist(also a garage rock singer and, I think, part-time pimp but I wasn't too clear on that point) and by this point in the film you're rooting for her attacker which makes you feel like a real scumbag but that happens fairly often when viewing films from this era.  There's lesbian ass massages(where we get the classic line of "I may be a bitch but I'll never be a butch", long scenes of ladies changing clothes, the obligatory giant 60's panties and a bloody dream sequence involving whips.  A good watch for old time perverts and degenerates.  Producer Dave Friedman shows up as a juror in a cameo.

SWINGERS MASSACRE (1975)


 This was originally titled INSIDE AMY and is the story of a kind of schlumpy fellow named Charlie who's looking to put a little spark back in his marriage so he convinces his wife to go to a swinger's bar with the awesome name of Filthy McNasty's.  They end back at a party where some partner swapping goes on and apparently ol' Charlie can't get a hard-on under this kind of pressure.  This is the first half of the movie, for the second half stupid Chuck goes on a jealousy-fueled, kill-crazy rampage, which if he stopped to think about it for a second would realize he has no one to blame but himself.  There's no blood in these scenes since he uses boring methods like strangulation and gassing his victims in their cars but you at least get some boobs in the sex scenes to keep things a little interesting.  Sexploitation regulars Rene Bond and Uschi Digart show up in these bits.
 Sometime in the 80's this was retitled as SWINGERS MASSACRE on VHS and marketed as another of the million or so slasher movies released in that decade.  Obviously it fails as a slasher but it's at least a mildly interesting oddball look at swinging(and homicide-inducing impotence) in the 70's.  Gary Kent who starred in the actual slasher THE FOREST has a small part here as a sexy fella.  AKA SUPER SWINGING PLAYMATES



Thursday, March 7, 2013

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2011)


  As usual if you want to see good modern films you have to forget about the U.S. and look elsewhere.  The few Indonesian films I've seen have been mostly very weird horror type things with floating head ghosts and that sort of thing.  This here is completely different than those and is a straight-up action/martial arts film more similar to something that might have come out of Hong Kong back in the 90's except there's way more bloody knife fights and no goofy bits.  You get kung-fu, gun-fu, machete-fu, axe-fu, knife-fu and a few other fu's I'm probably forgetting.  For an action movie this thing works amazingly well.  It's very well choreographed and keeps up the tension level throughout the run-time leaving very little room for boredom to ever set in. The plot is exactly what the title says, there's a police raid of an apartment building run by a crime-boss fellow.  I'm kinda shocked there's not a shitty Hollywood remake of this out yet but I hear the new Judge Dredd movie borrows a bit from this so there ya go.  Check out the original unless your allergic to ass-kicking excitement.



Wednesday, March 6, 2013

HELL HIGH (1989)


 If you took the movie CLASS OF 1984 and replaced the punk rockers with preppies and replaced the soundtrack with a bunch of lame music you would have this movie. It's not a complete waste of time though because there's also a little girl who accidentally kills a couple on a motorcycle setting up the last third of the movie where they forget which movie they're ripping off and turn this into a straight up slasher flick so at least it's a sort of interesting mash-up kind of a deal.  There's also some nudity thrown in but it looks like it's all from a body double since it's cut so oddly and you never see this mysterious naked bodies face. 
 I watched this online but I might have to purchase the actual DVD at some point because Joe Bob Briggs does commentary on it and his commentaries make even awful movies very entertaining. AKA RAGING FURY

Monday, March 4, 2013

THEM! (1954)


 This one manages to be equal parts goofy giant monster movie and super-serious, end-of-the-world, nuclear-warning science-fiction. The world's greatest, and only as far as I know, giant ants on-the-loose epic. Atomic bomb testing causes giant ants to run amok in the desert. One of the seemingly million giant bug movies that were churned out in the 50's and probably one of the bigger-budgeted ones.  There's a, surprising for 1954, tough woman scientist character and plenty of army vs. gargantuan ants action. Although watching it today the giant ants don't look very realistic it's still pretty remarkable that they actually built these big-ass things and got them to sorta move about(especially when you compare that to the lazy FX work done today). This is helped out by the weird sound effect that's used whenever our murderous monsters appear. This is a fav monster flick from my childhood and essential monster-kid viewing that was played often on Chiller Theater programs and is the movie that's credited with spawning all the rest of the 50s giant bug flicks, so it's hard to say much negative about it. It does get a little talky in a few bits and for a 50's horror/sci-fi movie it's got an unusually long run-time of over 90 minutes whereas most of these things just barely made it over and hour. Still you get lots of army vs. ants action along with the super-serious 50's acting. Also even goofy-looking puppet-headed ants beat modern CGI cartoon shit in my book.




                                                                  Italian poster!:



FORMICULA! (It's German for 'little ant'. Those silly Germans!): 



Sunday, March 3, 2013

THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (1956)


 The final chapter in the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON trilogy has the monster back in non-3D getting a shirt and a pair of pants and walking about breathing air thanks to his fresh new lungs.  I'm surprised they didn't get him some Frankenstein shoes to complete the ensemble.  He also puts on a few pounds and looks more like a pro wrestler than a swimmer.  It's pretty ridiculous visually but the movie works within it's own strange logic and is a decent enough classic creature feature for a boring Sunday afternoon.  If this was made more recently I imagine their would be an army of creatures for part 4.  There's recycled underwater footage thanks to the lower budget on this one, a monster vs. bobcat fight and the ending sort of teases us that the creature may have committed suicide but they do leave it open for further sequels which didn't happen. Also as with the better monster on the loose flicks you can sympathize with the monster and root for him against all the stupid human characters.


Played with something called THE PRICE OF FEAR which sadly looks like it has zero monsters in it:

VAMPIRE BRIDE (1960)


 Got a chance to catch this obscure Japanese horror flick in an actual theater yesterday and I would say this goes into the goofy but awesome monster movie category.  It's sort of an Asian version of a 50's Roger Corman film where our main character is the victim of some women who are jealous of her beauty so they try to kill her and then she becomes a hairy blood-drinking monster and it's revenge city.  Strangely the vampire here looks more like a bigfoot than your typical suave bloodsucker but that's one of the things that make this unique.  There's also an old witchy woman with a punk rock haircut, a humpback and a gaggle of rubber bats thrown in for some added spook-show thrills.  I'm not sure where you can see this in a theater outside of some weird retro art-house type of place(apparently there's a DVD available somewhere since that's what they projected) but if you ever get the chance check it out for a wacky monster flick where the monster is the hero.

An overview of Shintoho studios, which also brought us the even more goofy SUPER GIANT series:

Friday, March 1, 2013

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE (1965)


 A group of robots and aliens send Starman, who's kinda like the Japanese version of Superman, to Earth to protect us from this evil brain running roughshod who has an army of guys who wear Batman outfits and some other monster-types.  This was edited together from a few episodes of a Japanese theatrical serial called SUPER GIANT so the cutting is a little wonky at times and often lacks any sense.  The original series was from the 50's and this was first shown here on TV in '65 so it probably looked kinda old even back then.  It actually looks to me like it coulda been made in the 30's like one of those old-time serials except for the kung fu-style fighting.  There's another patchwork film with Starman called ATTACK FROM SPACE which I think is made from even earlier episodes of SUPER GIANT so I guess technically this might be a sequel of some sort.  Both of these are ridiculous and absurd but good for a cheap laugh just for the dumb goofball costumes, dumb plot and silly heroics.  Apparently things have been nutty and weird in Japan for a long time.

Starman, made of steel and sex appeal!: