Redemption & Salavation Review Explosion Part 3

London set Giallo thriller with a great funky score form Ennio Morricone. A head scratching mess of a film featuring some truly horrendous London accents dubbed into the mouths of bottom rung actors. This shouldn't put of the trash cinema fan however, as the tacky plot and wacky ideas come thick and fast in this deliriously silly shocker. Gang fights, sexy murders staged for clapping audiences and hilariously executed threats from the villain of the piece combine with the footage of swinging 70s London the produce a real treat for tolerant cult film buffs.




Another good starting point for horror fans who want to dip a tow into the "Breasts and bloodletting" films of French auteur Jean Rollin. A criminal commits a robbery, double crosses his partners and makes off with the loot. They chase him to an old chateau where he finds himself trapped inside with two women... He bullies them, then befriends them and soon a clique of blood sucking friends arrive to party with them all. All of Rollins visual motifs are here, the floaty costumes, sapphic interludes and beautiful vampires women. The slow, deliberate pace and shaky plot are no distraction as Rollin builds his films of eerie atmospherics and twisted eroticism. Low budget but beautiful, Jean Rollin is the master of softcore 70s horror.




A gang of pirates draws a ship onto some rocks and then abuse two girls who manage to escape from the wreckage. The ravaged girls are left for dead but at a local tavern during a heavy drinking session one of the pirates starts to experience terrifying guilty visions of his victims bleeding from the hands and eyes. When the pirates return to the scene of their crime they find the two hapless women still barely alive. They flee to the ruin of a haunted church where a powerful ghost lives. The two girls release him and a gratuitous sex scene ensues which is followed by the magical spirit blessing them with supernatural powers so they can enact their vengeance. Rollin's films often combine typically exploitative sex and violence with eerie and lyrical filmmaking. They occupy a strange little island of their own between the art-house and sexploitation horror and for cult movie fans they provide something totally original and different.




Seedy and depraved nude-fest that works like an exploitative grindhouse version of Scooby Doo, with lots of nasty things going on in a creepy old castle while lots of women disrobe. Plot twists that twist away to nowhere, a little blood and gore and a great many superfluous sex scenes make this a prime example of european erotic horror from the 70s. Forget about following the plot and just sit back and enjoy the sheer outlandishness of the movie.



One of a raft of adaptation's of the Marquis De Sade novels that helped fill Europe's sleazier cinemas during the 70s, Justine tells the story of two sister's living in a corrupt convent where they have to contend with a sexually predatory Mother Superior and a perverted Pastor. Justine's sister travels to London to find her fortune as a prostitute leaving her sister in the hands of the kinky nun and the evil vicar. Typical soft core with a dose of nastiness, this is kitsch 70s erotica that'll cause snigger's rather than anything else. Starring Koo Stark, Prince Andrew's Ex-girlfriend and a controversial glamour model at the time the film was made.



Spain in the early 70s was an interesting place for exploitation horror titles. With the ending of Franco's fascist regime a new liberalism meant that a fast buck could be made from lurid bloodshed, satanism and sapphic nudity. A lot of these movie (notably the blind dead films) still suffered censorship at home but the money minded filmmakers still secretly shot stronger material for inclusion in more explicit international versions. In this grubby offering from 1973, two sisters run a hotel in a small coastal village. One of the pair, driven to the edges of her fragile sanity by sexual longing and religious hysteria, begins to dismember the guests if they don't live up to her insanely strict moral standards.

The gore soaked bodies, ravaged by open wounds, are unceremoniously dumped in the wine vats that are stored in the basement. Soon guests are having a few words to say about the full-bodied wine they are being served with their meals. This film, along with other movies coming from Spain at the time, expressed a good deal of anti-Catholic sentiment but don't think this has any moral point to make. It's pure trash fun, well made, but trash all the same.




The King of sapphic vampire thrills, French horror and softcore director Jean Rollin, created one of his most accomplished films when he turned out Living Dead Girl back in 1982. Taking a few cues from the then in vogue Italian zombie cycle (He also partially directed the woeful but hilarious Zombie Lake) but still in keeping with his gothic obsessions and lust for artfully lensed lesbian bloodsuckers, The Living Dead Girl offers the usual sleepy, leisurely pace fans of the director have come to love; a film world in which linear plotting, sensible characterization and conventional ideas of filmmaking are overshadowed by dream logic, erotically charged horror and surreal leaps into the unknown. In the film a girl becomes zombified when the usual toxic spill transforms her into a flesh craving walking cadaver. The film splits away from the standard zombie narrative when a friend finds her and takes care of the walking corpse girl. The friends clearly loves the zombie girl in a way that is beyond mere platonic adoration and starts to lure victims to the undead woman, in much the same way that the stepmother in Hellraiser seduces hapless men so that Frank can heal himself with their blood.

The Living Dead Girl isn't going to please everyone and if you like big studio teen horror then this film is just going to perplex you. However, if you enjoy the weird aspects of Euro-trash cult cinema, you'll probably have at least a passing knowledge of Rollin's work and this movie is, once more, a good place to start.