PEEPING TOM (1960)

  This classic British film is kind of a proto-slasher flick but way classier than any slasher flick of the 80s. When it was originally released in England it was not considered classy at all though and was taken out of theaters after only 5 days. Our peeper here, Karlheinz Bohm always reminds me of Peter Lorre thanks to his accent. While nothing is really all that graphically shown this still works as a disturbing piece of cinematic history. 

 Shown on TV in the U.S. as FACE OF FEAR.

                                        Known in Italy as THE EYE THAT KILLS:

DEATH SHIP (1980)

 George Kennedy gets possessed by some evil old Nazi sailor ghosts on a mysterious ship of death! This one starts out with a bang as a cruise ship gets totaled by our naughty titular boat but then settles in to what's basically a disaster film crossed with a ghost movie.  Not sure that it works all that well but it's fun seeing Mr. Kennedy gradually become an unhinged psycho.   

Known in Danish as HEADING TOWARDS DEATH!:

INSTANT DEATH (2017)

 Lou Ferrigno was in his 60s when this movie was made but he still takes his shirt off quite a bit and seems to be in excellent shape. I have to believe he would easily beat Arnold Schwarzenegger in a pose down these days! The film itself though is filled with some pretty terrible acting and a completely predictable action-movie revenge plot where Lou's granddaughter gets killed and his daughter gets raped and blinded and then it's gun-fu time.  AKA RAGE(why a movie that I doubt ever played in a theater anywhere needs an alternate title I have no clue)

Unfortunately the YouTube version of this movie has all the violent bits cut out:

THE BLACK PANTHER (1977)

  Having nothing to do with the Marvel comic book hero of the same name or the American radical 60s pro-black group, this Black Panther is the true story of a black-hooded British serial killer who seems to only become a murderer because he bungles some bank robberies.  While our main character Donald Neilsen comes off as a complete prick who's pretty much a total asshole to everyone around him, including his wife and teenage daughter, you almost feel a little sorry for him since his objective appears to be to just obtain money. The movie kinda/sorta seems to blame his overly militarized mind on his willingness to blast apart anyone who gets in his way with a shotgun. His kidnapping plan becomes the final thing which goes awry and ultimately leads to his capture. The whole thing is an interesting portrayal of a nutjob and also a pretty big downer. 

 Since the film came out only a year after the real-life Neilsen was sentenced to life in prison and only a couple of years after the actual events portrayed it certanl;y pissed off the family of the victims and the police, who are not shown as doing the greatest job in capturing our naughty boy, and was inevitably banned in England up until it reappeared in the video era giving it a certain forbidden allure. 

HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT (1979)

  I've enjoyed pretty much all of the Pete Walker horror films I've seen up to this point so I figured I would check out his attempt to break out of the horror genre with this movie about a rock song writer(James Aubrey) who falls in love with a gal(Alison Elliot) who turns out, unbeknownst to him, to be underage. It's certainly something different for Mr. Walker and apparently it didn't work out so well because his next, and last, film(the all-star extravaganza HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS) was back in the horror realm. It's an interesting film with plenty of nudity on show but least favorite of Walker's output. 

 The band Jigsaw appear, and provide the soundtrack, as the fictional band Bad Accident.

                               Jigsaw's big hit!:

TOWER OF EVIL (1972)

  Pretty gory for a British film of this era, this film deals with 2 groups of people who end up an an island, with a tower on it and some caves under it, who end getting murdered one by one. Also lots of nudity and some disfigured monstrous killers. Pretty basic stuff if you've seen any slasher movie but hey this was 1972 and we weren't drowning in those type of films just yet. 

 Retitled and rereleased as BEYOND THE FOG in 1980 after John Carpenter's THE FOG came out to fool people into thinking it was a sequel. AKA HORROR ON SNAPE ISLAND

Known in Mexico as THE TOWER OF HORROR!:

Groovy 70s triple feature with that movie where a mummy tells you sex stories and that BONNIE AND CLYDE on motorcycles flick!:

HORROR HOSPITAL (1973)

 A great example of 70s British horror. You get a naughty dwarf, a car that lops heads right off, a slimy, burned-up monster running amuck and of course an insane doctor(Michael Gough) who runs a horrific hospital(where he lobotomizes people to make them happy to be his personal army?). There's obviously some social message about the generation gap with all the young long-hairs being menaced by the old weirdos as was a popular concern at the time. There are a slew of AKA's including COMPUTER KILLERS, DEATH WARD #13 and EASTWORLD(to no doubt confuse people into thinking they were seeing the sequel to WESTWORLD which also came out this same year). 

Released on video under the lurid title of DOCTOR BLOODBATH!:

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)

  The final film in Hammer studios Frankenstein series brings back peter Cushing as the naughty doctor and teams him up with a young admirer and emulator of his work(Shane Briant). The monster is played by David Prowse who among other hulking monsters over the years would go on to famously play Darth Vader. Taking place in an insane asylum this is a decent enough watch though I often find the endings to these Hammer monster movies a bit of a letdown and this one is no exception there. It also leaves the ending open for more adventures of our wacky mad scientists which sadly didn't happen. 

Played in England on a weird double bill with a Shaw Brothers kung fu flick from 2 years prior:

KILLER'S MOON (1978)

  "you were only raped, as long as you don't tell anyone about it you'll be alright. You just pretend it never happened"

 The closest thing I can compare this to is 80s slasher ALONE IN THE DARK since they're both about a group of escaped homicidal mental patients. Since this came out in '78 I guess you have to call it a proto-slasher and it really pales in comparison to it's 80s counterpart. There are multiple rapes and murders going on so it is pretty sleazy but it never feels anywhere near as sleazy as similar stuff from this era like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT etc. Fellow British director Peter Walker managed some pretty great stuff  at this same time so I guess my main problem with this is comparing it to a lot of the superior exploitation flicks it never quite lives up to.

CURSE OF THE VOODOO (1965)

  This hunter(Bryant Haliday) kills a lion in Africa which unleashes the "voodoo curse" of the title although I don't think anything that we see counts as actual voodoo. Really dull British horror which mostly consists of our main character hallucinating about African warriors. I'm sure it's considered very racist by today's standards. AKA VOODOO BLOOD DEATH

Released in America on a double bill with the cheezier but more watchable FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER:

FIRST LOVE (2019)

 You could call this one director Takashi Miike's version of TRUE ROMANCE where you take a couple and drop them into the middle of some mobsters fighting over drugs. Miike seems to have gone the David Cronenberg route where he starts out making really strange oddball cinema and then ends up making more straight forward gangster movies. Of course Miike has made way more fims then David so he's really ventured outside of any strict genre guidelines over the years. A bit overlong at almost 2 hours but it does manage to maintain a high energy level throughout. Heads roll, arms roll and lots of gun-fu commences.

 

THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)

  Peter Cushing and Calvin Lockhart(of COTTON COMES TO HARLEM fame) are featured in this British horror film that some call a blaxploitation werewolf movie. Despite the funky soundtrack and a couple of black characters it really isn't much like an American blaxploitation flick. Still a fun one that starts out like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME before settling into a more typical whodunnit tale. There is a bit where they stop the movie and take a "werewolf break" so you can guess who's the wolfman(or wolfwoman) so that's something. The monster itself is kind of a letdown though being just a big fluffy dog 

Released on VHS under this more exploitative title!:

THE BODY BENEATH (1970)

  Garbage-film master Andy Milligan does his take on the vampire movie. Made during Mr. Andy's adventures in England you will hear a lot of British accents in this which you better get used to since this is a a Milligan film and it's almost entirely made up of long boring speeches only interrupted occasionally by some decidedly not very bloody vampire antics. See vampire girls in green face-paint, a hunchback assistant and a bunch of talky talk. Someone does get the old knitting-needles-in-the-eye gag pulled on them in one of the only scenes even attempting anything gory. A lot of people claim this is one of Milligan's better films which really says a lot!  AKA VAMPIRE'S THIRST

                                             Quite the snooze-inducing double feature!:

DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS (1971)

  I caught this one recently as the 2nd movie in an all-day marathon of giallos. Following OASIS OF FEAR  in the lineup this one couldn't help but drag in comparison. It is after all a pretty standard mystery and there's not much in the way of a body count(though the one big kill shown does bring the gore quotient). It is also fairly stylish throughout and the soundtrack grooves. Strangely there's a cross-dressing guy with a fake hand that shows up and a stripper in black-face. Nowhere near the best giallo I've seen but a decent enough watch. AKA DEATH STALKS ON HIGH HEELS

 Director Luciano Ercoli would make the similarly titled DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT the following year. The plots have no connection.    

KONGA (1961)

  As far as silly giant monster movies go this one is certainly entertaining enough for a watch. Made the same year as the definitive British giant monster movie GORGO, this time instead of a GODZILLA-influenced monster we get a more KING KONG-inspired creature who starts out as a chimpanzee and as he gets bigger is magically(and unexplainedly) transformed into an ape. The story itself is nothing like KONG and owes more to your standard mad-scientist yarns of the 50s. In addition to a giant ape running loose you get some over-sized man-eating plants which can't help but remind us all of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS which came out the previous year. Now if they only made a GORGO VS. KONGA flick it woulda been cinematic gold! 

Inspired this comic book series which ran for 23 issues and is very expensive to find today!:

BLOODTIDE (1982)

  I was familiar with the beauty of Lydia Cornell thanks to the Ted Knight sitcom TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT back in the 80s. While Miss Lydia does not get totally naked here we do get the next best thing with her being scantily-clad and/or in a bathing suit for most of her screen time here. Unfortunately while ogling busty 80s actresses is entertaining that's about the best thing I can say about this very slow-moving sea-monster flick that takes place on a Greek island. You do have some heavyweight actors here including James Earl Jones, Jose Ferrer and Martin Kove of KARATE KID fame but the story itself is not all that engaging for the most part.  AKA DEMON LAKE and RED TIDE. Shown on TV as DEMON ISLAND.

ELEPHANT (1989)

  I thought I had already seen the stupidest movie with the title ELEPHANT a while back when I watched Gus Van Sant's take on the Columbine school shooting  but apparently I was very wrong. Compared to this thing that one was an absolute masterpiece. This here is just a 39 minute long, very repetitive, series of assassinations of people by guns and that's it. Barely any dialogue, no plot, no reasons given for anything that happens, just violence for violence's sake, or in this case, according to director Alan Clarke, to point out that violence is bad. While I'm no expert on the horrible violence between Ireland and England in the 80s and before, this certainly didn't teach me anything. Maybe if you're more familiar with the whole thing, this would resonate more vividly. From what I know though the killings, which often employed bombs and other implements of destruction weren't always quite as neat and painless as depicted here.  This was made for, and shown on, British TV which explains why it's not super gory but seems amazing that it ever actually got shown.  

MADE IN BRITAIN (1982)

                                                              "Fucking wankers!"

  Working my way through the Alan Clarke Collection DVD boxset we get to this TV movie about a racist, violent and generally antisocial skinhead portrayed by a young, and very fit, Tim Roth. There's not really a plot but just a series of anarchistic clashes with various authority figures and "normal" members of society. Probably best to watch this if you're an angry youth. Also would make a good prequel to Clarke's SCUM(if the time frame was a bit different) since that's obviously where young Mr. Roth is ultimately headed. 

Music to throw bricks through a window to:

SCUM (1979)

 

 This was originally made, by British director Alan Clarke, as a TV movie in 1977. It was banned before it got shown so he then made this theatrical version. What you get here is a very downbeat look at life in an English Borstal(or juvenile detention center for young men for us Americans). Complete with male on male rape, suicide by slit wrists, plentiful racism and gratuitous violence. Not really an exploitation flick this has more of a pseudo-documentary feel to it and is definitely an interesting but very dated time-capsule.  

PREY (1977)

  Not to be confused with that new feminist PC PREDATOR nonsense this is a 70s British sci-fi/horror joint. More commonly known as ALIEN PREY when it was released on VHS to help confuse it with that other old school movie about a gal and an alien. In this case though we get two gals and not just any gals but lesbians, which gives us a great excuse for some homosexual female on female hijinks(sexual and violent) to ensue in between scenes of a malevolent visitor from the stars (who just looks like a guy with a dog nose, some fancy contact lenses and fangs thrown in his mouth) chomping on various wildlife, police and other local denizens. This is a very weird movie because it shoehorns a fish out of water story(our alien trying to fit in with his lesbo hosts) into a flesh-chomping monster on the loose tale. It does get bogged down a bit in the drama bits but it was odd enough to keep me interested. Also you get an alien wearing drag so that's something!

 Director Norman J. Warren would go on to make another sorta-ALIEN-rip-off called INSEMINOID a few years later but I found this one way more interesting. 

This old VHS cover always made me think this was a way gorier movie than it actually is!:

Known in Germany as THE DESTRUCTER:

Known in Italy as TERROR IN AMITYVILLE PARK: