The Yellow Teddybears

The early 60s saw censorship slowly slipping and UK producers cashing in with a series of controversial (by the standards of the day) movies that pushed the sexual content envelope to it's limit.

Tony Tenser, later of UK horror specialists Tigon Pictures, was behind this 1963 movie which was packaged as an exploitative and pervy look at burgeoning sexuality among teenage school girls but was in fact a message movie about the perils of pre-marital...

Its the year 3000 and the earth has become a desolate wasteland. The seas and rivers have all dried up and humanity is on the brink of extinction. An underground settlement knows the whereabouts of an underground spring that contains enough water to save the human race. But in order to reach it they must travel across dangerous territory contorolled by ' Crazy Bull' a sadistic barbarian who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. After a convoy from the settlement comes under attack from CB the...

Hi all, thanks for reading my blogs so far, which have been a mix of my wrestling training diary, and some videos of bizarre things in the street. one good thing about being wrestling trained is I can do stunts that look really wild away from the ring, but they look dangerous and public reactions are often funny. This video contains no public reactions, though it is one of my favourite stunts. Enjoy.

Wild Style





Before the Hollywood exploitation of the New York Hip Hop scene saw the entertaining but totally camp and clueless Breakdance movies rake in the dollars, the originators of the worlds most popular music collaborated on a scrappy, badly acted but riveting look at New York street life, which brought together the four elements of the culture, B-Boying, Graffiti writing, rapping and DJing, into a strange hybrid of drama and documentary.
...

The Honeymoon Killers





A raw low budget classic from 1970, the Honeymoon Killers is based on real events in which a couple united by their outsider status go on a murderous rampage. When When Raymond and Martha meet through a lonely-hearts club they seem like a match made in heaven; she obese, obsessive and needy and he weak, slimy and deceitful. Together they hit on a vile scheme where he poses as a lonely guy who takes women from the dating club out...

Thirst





Deep Red and Blow Up actor David Hemmings stars in this amusing late 70s Australian vampire offering that predates the Blade movies in it's portrayal of blood drinkers as a well organized society, building human farms for harvest.

Returning readers may have read about my love of Near Dark, which portrays vampires as trailer trash predators in contrast to the high born sophisticates of most vampiric cinema. Normally, I'd side with...

After the success of Ruggero Deodatos Cannibal Holocaust, Umberto Lenzi was hired by Dania Films to make two quickie cash inns, Eaten Alive and the film under review here Cannibal Ferox.

Cannibal Ferox kicks off in New York with the murder of a drug addict by two mobsters who are looking for someone named Mike Logan (John Morghen aka Gianni Lombardo Radice). We then cut to the Amazon to meet the main characters; Gloria (Lorraine De Selle), Rudy (Danilo Mattei) and Pat (Zora Kerova)....

Aenigma





"All her enemies will be eliminated... but first they will suffer!"


When a girl is rendered comatose following a cruel prank played by her school friends, she takes revenge from her hospital bed by possessing a new pupil at the exclusive boarding school she once attended. Soon the haunted newbie is setting about extracting a horrible revenge for the cruelty meted out to her possessor...

Director Lucio Fulci...

I saw something in the newspapers today about how exercise does more for losing weight than diet does. It wasn't underestimating the importance of diet; just saying that it was that way round. Luckily, though I am currently out of shape, I've already undertaken the research years ago and am not, as such, a beginner to exercise. When I was doing all of the research, nothing was more true to say than that health advice is always changing, and often contradicting previous advice. This article today...

Aaah, the United Kingdom. Home of football hooligans, happy slapping and indeed daisy chaining! If you are yet to hear of the latter then you should be chuffed to be living in a society that has some sort of control over its youth. Few British films in recent times have had the giblets to portray Britain as it is: preferring to revel in a cinematic bubble of Richard Curtis productions or Guy Richie clones. The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is about to change that… Welcome to the jungle....

Before Non Ho Sonno (A.K.A Sleepless A.K.A I Can’t Sleep), Dario Argento was suffering some serious verbal abuse from both fans and critics after the catastrophe that was Phantom of the Opera (1998). Few people will disagree with me when I say that it truly was the lowest point of his career. Some have said that since Opera Dario has been in an ever declining spiral, with failure after failure that began with his collaboration with George A. Romero on Two Evil Eyes. Argento-lite effort Trauma,...

Lucio Fulci directs and stars as a film maker called er... Lucio Fulci. During the shooting of his latest film Fulci is being overcome by macabre visions including Nazi orgies (actually a clip from Ghosts of Sodom), decomposing bodies, Cats clawing in his head. After smashing tins of red paint, he decides to go and see a psychiatrist, professor Egon Schwarz (David L. Thompson). Unfortunately for Fulci, Schwarz is a homicidal maniac who plans to use him as a scapegoat for his own vicious crimes....

“Macho, macho man! I want to be a macho man!”

The ‘poliziottesco’ genre couldn’t have asked for a more fitting song. With big tough men, often sporting gloriously oversized moustache’s and even bigger guns, strut around most major Italian cities making up their own laws and following their own rules. It’s a genre that contains more immorality than a whore house in Mexico, and that’s just the Police force!

Tough guys like Franco Nero, Maurizio Merli and...

Ruggero Deodato, along with Sergio Martino, are both anomalies in the Italian exploitation stable of directors. They stick to genre films and follow the rules as gospel: Gore, T&A and cheese are requirements that are not to be omitted from any of their movies. Where they differ from the likes of Umberto Lenzi or Bruno Mattei (R.I.P) is that they bring a level of intelligence that you would expect to find in Argento’s, Soavi’s of even Fulci’s best works. Anyone who has seen Deodato’s...

Hi all. Have really been enjoying my time on here so far, lots of nice comments received so thanks for that. These forums seem to be free from lots of negative people that other forums sometimes have.
The video I posted of 'the wild bird' character seems to have been well received, and I got a request to see some comparitively early work of mine. So here goes- from my DVD archives, the Vehicle Impression...

Massacre At Central High





Massacre At Central High is at first glace a typical slice of mid 70s exploitation, mixing as it does all the lurid violence and leering nudity that was required by Drive-in promoters and Grindhouse owners to keep their audiences sated. But beneath the usual trappings is a much odder movie that seems to have influenced later films such as Heathers in it's look at the corrupt malignancy that can lurk beneath the exterior of an...

Rocketship XM





The Future Is Coming!


A cheap B&W movie rushed into to production to beat the groundbreaking "Destination Moon" to the cinema screens in the early 50s, Rocketship XM sees a group of plucky astronauts veer off their chosen route to the moon, landing instead on mars in a mind numbing piece of unscientific anti-logic that sets up the rest of this odd slice of B-movie madness.

On arrival the crew discover...

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari





Enjoy the movie!


An asylum inmate reveals the story of Dr. Caligari, who has a sleeping walking slave called Cesare who is murdering the townsfolk of Holstenwell. Is the tale a product of one mans twisted imagination or the grisly truth...

A vital entry both in the history of horror cinema and film as a whole. Made in Germany in the 1920s, the film is a surreal masterpiece. Cabinet... is...

Get Christie Love






Get Christie Love is a TV movie spin off from the blaxploitation movies of the early 70s that featured ballsy afro queens who didn't take any crap and meted out justice with a Kung Fu kick and a mean one liner. Think movies like Coffy, Cleopatra Jones or Foxy Brown. The film was successful enough to spawn it's own shortlived TV series.

Following the usual path of female lead black movies of the time, Christie...

I Bury The Living





Robert Kraft is starting a new job as the chairman of a committee overseeing the running of a massive cemetery, a graveyard so huge that a map is kept in the office, displaying every grave. Pins are used, black for filled graves and white for sold plots that have yet to be occupied by the deceased.

When Robert makes an error and places a pair of black pins on the wrong grave site causing the young couple who paid for...

Attack of the Giant Leeches





From The Murky Underground Caverns...


When a drunken trapper reports that giant monsters are lurking in the local swamp, the townsfolk don't believe his inebriated ramblings until people start disappearing...

Welcome to 50s monster movie heaven in this basically awful but entertaining piece of tinpot cheapness.

The trapper turns up later, extremely dead and sporting great...

Teenagers From Out Space





Ultra low budget 50s drive-in nonsense for fans of kitzch camp and Sci Fi aficionados. It's Martian invasion time as the pesky aliens invade Earth in order to use our planet as a breeding ground for their food creatures (or men in rubber suits...you decide!) The Gargons!!!

One Martian becomes attached to an Earth woman, Betty (Are all women in 50s America called Betty?) and must now fight his own race to save...

Reefer Madness! (Tell Your Children)




Enjoy the whole movie!


A moralising cult classic from the 30s, designed to exploit fears of drug abuse while masquerading as a educational film in order to get shots of ladies showing their stocking tops past the stringent censors, Reefer Madness is a delirious riot of a movie in which we learn that smoking weed can lead to an interest in "Race" music (i.e. Jazz) played by wild haired dope lunatics...

Black Fist





"The Big Bad Black Dude of the Streets... He'll bust you up, slam you down and blast you into pieces!"


With a tag line like that how could I resist! I love blaxploitation movies. It's the music, the fashion, the hair and the ghetto kung fu action. I got sucked in by seeing Shaft at a young age but it's the less well known, cheaper and generally more exploititive ones that hold my interest now. Their more violent and...

Dementia 13





Roger Corman gave a leg up to a great many of Hollywood's biggest directors including ex Happy Days star Ron Howard and Francis Ford Coppola who made his directorial debut in Ireland on Corman's production, Dementia 13.

The Haloran family are gathering to carry out a morbid ritual to remember the demise of a drowned relative. The family bicker and plot while an axe murderer begins to stalk the grounds. Soon the family members...

Carnival of Soul





This was a one off movie by a company who specialized in industrial and educational films for businesses and schools. The producers obviously didn't realize they were making a classic that would go on to influence many genre filmmakers, including Romero who was clearly influenced in his choice of zombie make-up for "Night of the Living Dead"

A teenage drag race goes horribly wrong causing a car to plummet from a bridge...

Satan's Sadists





A perverse thrill can sometimes be gotten from wallowing in the last gasps of a once successful actors career. Think of Molly Ringwald, once a part of Pretty in Pink and heading for glory before crashing in the 90s and ending up in the terrible Aussie slasher movie "Cut".

And so to Russ Tamblyn, once riding high on the success of West Side Story, before Hollywood's excesses saw him plummet to earth, leaving him starring...

The Phantom of the Paradise





Carrie director Brian De Palma turns in a truly bizarre 70s oddity from the decade when studios were green lighting all sort of wacky projects.

A recording mogul, the diminutive Swan, makes a deadly enemy when he steals some music from Leach, an aspiring songwriter, to use at the launch of his new rock venue/palace of dreams, The Paradise.

Leach is a sensitive singer-songwriter type in the typical...

Sex & Zen





Classic Hong Kong Cat III eroticism that still manages to befuddle the sensibilities years after it was first released. Mixing softcore sex scenes with costume drama, this example of libertine film making is a great example of a genre that flourished in the Far East for a while until the Chinese government cracked down on it's more explicit facets.

Sex & Zen is the everyday story of a newly married man who goes on a journey...

The Nun & The Devil






Following the huge success of Ken Russell churching baiting classic The Devils, the Italian B-movie industry kicked into gear with a slew of "Nunsploitation" cash-ins designed to rack up the sacrilege, sex and bloodshed to get punters into theatres. The Nun and The Devil is one of the better examples of the style and is a good movie despite being in extremely dubious taste. Taking place in a 16th century holy order, it shows...

Rollerball





High-end 70s Sci-Fi fun in the paranoid future mould that seemed to thrive in the post-hippy era. This would make a good triple bill with Logan's Run and Soylent Green, all three sharing that combination of dark conspiracy theory and an air of 70s camp.

In this head-spinning future sport classic James Caan plays a champion Rollerballer. Rollerball is a high-speed combination of rollerskating, American Football, motorbike racing...

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes





The stella success of the original Planet of the Apes movie spawned a franchise that encompassed live action TV, a kids cartoon and four sequels. All the follow up films are entertaining, although diminishing budgets mean that some of the films are fun to watch for the wrong reasons! Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the first sequel and relates to a new crew, sent to rescue Taylor, the astronaut from the first movie....

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1958





The Nightmare That Threatens The World!


Don Siegal's classic slice of Cold War paranoia continues to send chills down the spine after over 50 years and several remakes.

Body Snatchers is set in the world of perfect 1950s small town Americana, A Norman Rockwell Idyll of conservative values and well behaved, perfectly manicured wives, where, seemingly from nowhere, mysterious vegetable...

Some time travel business now...


The Final Countdown





A modern aircraft carrier, captained by Kirk Douglas, is caught up in a supernatural storm that throws the ship back in time to a point just before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Habour. The situation presents the crew with one the great dilemmas in Sci-Fi cinema, do they make a pre-emptive attack against the Japanese carrier that is moving towards the habour, thus saving...

In Defence of Eurotrash


Some people on Twitter don't like the term Eurotrash to describe movies and they feel it's a insult to the art of movie making and that those who might use the term are somehow ignorant and unenlightened about cinema.

They also feel that people who use the term are only reviewing cult movies to be trendy or ironic. I'd argue differently. It takes a certain knowledge of cult cinema to apply the term correctly and besides, if you've actually...

Haze





Short claustrophobic horror movie from Shinya Tsukamoto, director of such genre-bending shockers a Tetsuo 1 & 2, Tokyo Fist and the brilliant A Snake Of June. The director himself stars in this strange fever dream of a movie in which a man wakes up locked in a cramped, lightless concrete room in which he can barely move.

Why is he there and where did he come from? We can see that he has a horrific stomach injury and that he is gradually...

Three on a Meathook





A lonely country boy called Billy lives on an isolated farm with his smothering and slightly mental father. Billy needs to be hidden away because he can't be trusted around other folks...especially women.

Billy is convinced that he murders them in a blind frenzy but has no memory of the crimes afterwards. This terrible fate will befall four young women who have car trouble and seek shelter at the farm. Soon each will...

Black Emanuelle

Black Emanuelle stars Laura Gemser stars as cult leader 'The Divine One' in this early 80s sexploitation movie about a bizarre cult. Members of the group all indulge in free love and anyone who doesn't fancy rutting with wild abandon gets whipped bloody in front of everyone as an exercise in humiliation. Add to this bizarre mix some head scratching contemporary dance numbers and a vague plot about the cult leaders boyfriend falling for a senators daughter, leading...

Conan the Barbarian





Arnie helped to define the early 80s Swords & Sandals revival with this epic tale of Iron age fantasy that would spawn copycat movies like the fantastic Beastmaster, as well as a spate of less than perfect Italian hack jobs.

Based on the fictional work of Robert E. Howard, the film sees Arnie play the eponymous hero, a hulk-like warrior of mercifully few words (most of which seem to be 'Crom'). The film opens with...

Death Walks at Midnight





A Great Example of the Italian Giallo horror genre that flourished in sleazier European cinemas during the late 60s/early 70s. A fashion model is drugged as part of a publicity stunt and while tripping out witnesses a nasty murder involving a masked man with a spiked glove. When her story is published she finds that the evil fiend is now stalking her and taking out her friends.

Typically stylish but nonsensical...

Phantasm





Phantasm: the delusion of a disordered mind, a phantasm, a spirit, a ghost!


Early outing from Don Coscarelli (Beastmaster, Bubba Ho Tep) in which a sinister undertaker known as "The Tall Man" steals people, shrinks them down and sends them through a portal into a hell dimension where they work as dwarf slaves. Anyone getting in the way gets chased by his silver death balls, shiny spheres with spikes that attach to your...

Female Yakuza Tale





For fans of other Female lead Japanese exploitation movies like Lady Snowblood or the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, Female Yakuza Tale is going to be a must see. The Japanese made sleazy movies with undeniable style and this film has all the graphic elements that make these movies so good even 30 years after they were first produced.

In this one a women called Ocho is captured by a drug dealing cartel who use Chinese...

Dead or Alive: Final





Apologies: I can only find the trailer with a Spanish narration. Enjoy the visuals. Unless your Spanish that is...


After what seems like an age, Takashi Miike's concluding episode of the Dead or Alive series finallly gots a UK outing on DVD. Tartan released the first two parts during the initial rush to release quirky Japanese extreme cinema, It was a few years before UK fans could get their hands on the concluding...

Visitor Q





Visitor Q was part of a V-Cinema (Japanese "Straight-to-video genre) series on the nature of love


In which the already taboo busting Japanese director of such close to the bone entertainment as Ichi The Killer, Full Metal Yakuza and Imprint decides to try and offend everyone on the face of the earth with a low budget shot on video opus that seeks to scramble your synapses by throwing as much degradation and filth onto...

Full Metal Yakuza





In Full Metal Yakuza, director Takashi Miike, maker of such extreme Japanese movies as Zebraman, Ichi The Killer and One Missed Call, steals the plot from Robocop, as a downtrodden low ranking gangster is transformed into a robot-killing machine by a crazy science guy. Our lowly gangster goes from meek servant to the gang boss, from a natural target for bullies to a super-strong fighting warrior who in one memorable scene in a car...

This is a new complex character I'm working on. It took hours of thinking to conceive of how she (it's female) would move, act, react and things of that nature.

Danger Diabolik





Well, here it is, one of the greatest slices of kitsch 60s pop-art cinema ever produced.

Directed by Italian genre expert Mario Bava, this comic book tale of crime capers and daring heists is the source the Beastie Boys video for Body Movin', in which they use footage from the movie.

Telling the OTT story of Diabolik (John Phillip Law), a masked international thief and his blond bombshell girlfriend as...

If I was 30 years older I'd marry Ingrid Pitt...

Countess Dracula





Hammers most voluptuous Scream Queen, Ingrid Pitt stars in a film loosely based on the notorious Countess Bathory, a genuine character from the darker annals of medieval European history, although I wouldn't want to vouch for the veracity of Hammer's take on here story.

She is a withered old crone who longs for the erotic attentions of a young stud who has...

I am new to cult labs, so was wondering what you all thought about following dreams. I used to do wrestling and am currently training to go back to that, but have what some people consider to be weird opinions. For example, once you begin to follow a dream, its like anything else in life- it requires hard work and is still fun, but its reality is always different to how you imagined it when you were, for example 8 years old. There is often no glamour to what appears to be a glamorous life to those...

I recently began running in an effort to lose weight, my first step in my journey back to being a wrestler again.
Running is a hellish exercise, but one that works. You never see overweight people running though. Have you ever seen one? I think it’s because it is such a public thing, like an announcement that you are trying to lose weight. You never see adverts for diet supplements featuring overweight people saying ‘I’m taking this and its working’. They just show the finished product....

Scared To Death





Lugosi's only starring role in a colour film is not among his best work, but Bela is never boring to watch, even in a real crud like 'Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla' (you can't make these titles up...).

In Scared To Death we follow the narration of a deceased woman who describes the events leading to her demise. Opening in a morgue, we here that a beautiful lady has died of fright, but how did such a terrible thing...

Bride of the Monster





Bride of the Monster is an essential movie for all students of trash film making, a classic Z-grade shocker from the master of bad movies, Ed Wood.

Bela Lugosi stars in this poverty stricken sci-fi effort as a mad doctor (is there any other kind?) who kidnaps twelve men and attempts to use atomic energy to turn them into super-humans. A sassy female journalist gets wind of his scheme, heads up to his lair to investigate...

I Monster





I Monster is an early 70s retelling of the old Jeckyll & Hyde story in which the names have been changed, presumably to protect the innocent.

Produced by UK horror studio Amicus in the early 70s and starring the always intriguing Christopher Lee, It tells the grisly tale of a Dr Marlowe, who discovers a drug that lowers all inhibition, causing rather proper English ladies to divest themselves of their clothing while reducing...

Republished from my days reviewing for "The Man". As before, these were meant to be viewed individually as people browsed the site, so there's a few repeated points.

Whether my reviews helped to shift any product is another matter...


Tokyo X Erotica





Skirting that fine line between art and pornography, Japanese "Pink Cinema" constantly pushes the boundaries of taste and decency. As an example of this genre, Tokyo...

I really rate these odd Spanish oddities. These are from "that high street retailers" site that I used to pen reviews for. So there's some repetition. Don't let that spoil the wonky euro-trash fun though...


Tombs Of The Blind Dead





Classic low rent zombie action, a product of the prolific Spanish horror industry of the 70s. As the countries dictator Franco's power faded in that decade new generation of exploitation film makers...

The Wasp Woman





The Woman's Driving Passion is to be... Queen of Beauty


She has the head and hands of a wasp but the body of a beautiful woman she is...Wasp Women.

Another production line cheapy from Roger Corman before he hit critical pay-dirt with his series of Edgar Allen Poe films, this isn't high art but for tacky movie aficionados it'll hit all the right buttons.

The head of a successful cosmetics...

Dracula Vs Frankenstein





Al Adamson should win a posthumous Oscar for services to the trashy drive-in movie! Whether it be cheap Kung Fu knock offs, scummy biker flicks or this ghost-train wreck of a movie, his films may have been terrible, but they were never dull.

Cobbled together from other unfinished projects, Dracula Vs Frankenstein has it all, Mad scientists hiding out in fair ground attractions, deranged hunched back assistants...

Hell gate





This is one of those weird low budget 80s horror movies that helped to fill the shelves of video store horror sections back in the day. Treading a strange line between the horrific, the dreamlike and the comedic, it's definitely a product of it's time featuring lots of splashy gore , rubbery monster effects and soft focus dreamy bits. Like so much 80s US horror product, it's seems to steal it's surreal, fever dream atmosphere from Suspiria,...

Scrubbers





A female response to the borstal classic Scum, Scrubbers follows two girls who escape from an open youth prison. Annetta longs to see her daughter who is being cared for by a convent while Carol wants to be recaptured so she can return to the high security prison where her girlfriend is being held. Carol's wish comes true when she is apprehended and returned to custody, but her world is shattered when she finds out that her lover, Doreen,...

Hellraiser





Clive Barker's seminal horror movie Hellraiser, is a gore drenched yarn about a man, Frank, who becomes trapped in a hell dimension of perfect pain when he messes around with a cursed mechanical box. On solving the puzzle of the cube he his dragged into the realm of the Cenobites, a race of S&M demons who pierce and tear at his flesh with spiked chains, torturing him to a state of agonizing ecstasy. Our violent anti-hero returns to the earthly...

Dracula





A late 70s, big budget studio take on the Dracula tale starring a vampire lord whose style is more Discotastic Barry Manilow then broodingly Gothic Bela Lugosi. Frank Langella is the brooding count in this beautifully staged if campy version of Bram Stoker's classic horror tale of blood sucking terror.

When a ship is grounded off the coast of Whitby the only survivor is Count Dracula. He has arrived with a big consignment of...

Madman





"Deep In The Woods, Lurks A Hideous Evil... Don't Even Whisper His Name!"

A minor classic of the stalk 'n' slash movie explosion that followed in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th, Madman plays to every cliché in the slasher movie book but pulls it off thanks to it's streak of nasty gore, a suspense filled atmosphere and a fast pace, a must when your dealing with illogical horror movies. So many films of the era suffered...

Umberto Lenzi could be the man responsible for both the creation and the destruction of the Italian cannibal cycle. If it wasn’t for his 1972 effort Deep River Savages (A.K.A Man from Deep River) it’s likely we wouldn’t have had the genre’s crown jewel, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Lenzi would go on to make the infamous Cannibal Ferox in 1981, that takes all the extreme elements of Deodato’s classic, but leaves the intelligence of that film behind, resulting in a truly offensive...

Curse of the Crimson Altar





Second division horror from the Hammer Studio's chief rivals, Tigon,The Curse of the Crimson Altar features three of the horror genres biggest stars, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Euro-Scream Queen, Barbara Steele, in a campy witchcraft tale for fans of kitsch 60s gothic.

Mark Eden plays Robert Manning, a man who finds out that his brother, Peter, has mysteriously disappeared. Robert visits an isolated...

The story of libertine filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, is almost as fascinating as his final work. He was considered one of the most dangerous men in Italy and his work was feared by the powers that be. His films were headache enough, but he was also a renowned poet, journalist, script writer and author. When you add all that up, he proved to be a major pain in their backside. The fact he was gay didn’t increase his popularity with the right-wing government either, and his anti-fascism and communist...

Corridors of blood





Karloff returned to classy British horror in the late 50s after 25 years with the grisly Victorian gothic of 'Corridors of Blood'.

Karloff plays a surgeon troubled by the agony caused by his craft as effective anaesthesia has yet to be developed. His experiments into finding a solution bare fruit when he makes laughing gas but his demonstration in front of his peers goes wrong when a patient wakes up half way through...

Night of the Eagle

A sensible university academic played by Peter Wyngarde is looking forward to a bright future until he finds out that his wife has been concealing magical charms around their home, believing that they will protect and bring good luck. He tells her to destroy them but this turns out to be a grave error as his luck is about to change, bringing a whole mess of trouble.

A quirky old fashioned little spook show, Night of the Eagle plays up to the old cliches...

Last year I took a short course in scriptwriting and this is the result. It's only a first draft, but it got some pretty decent feedback from the lecturer. I've since gone on to pen a few more short scripts, so I've not had time to go back and brush this up - could be a task for the coming weekend!

I tried to upload an easier on the eye PDF file but it was too big, so a txt file will have to do I'm afraid. If you have a spare five minutes, please have a read and let me know what you...

In my first entry I explained that I am returning to wrestling. In this entry, I’ll introduce the other side of me, which is producing wild videos.
I enjoy entertaining others, and fell in love with wrestling because it was a mix of magic, athleticism, acting and everything else. While at school, I was unable to do it, so was always trying to find other ways to entertain. I built up a reputation for being a handful of trouble and was banned from having a camcorder. At 17, I finally got...

My name is Edward Harris. This blog will follow my quest to make a career out of professional wrestling. As a kid, I jumped between wanting to be a magician, an actor, an athlete, a comedian and an artist. At age 8, I discovered professional wrestling and discovered I can be all 5. While I was at school I couldn’t entertain people in wrestling matches so I took a video camera and did whatever else I could think of. This currently amounts to 300 hours of videos ranging from sleeping in bedshops...

Dreaming of Screaming

Sam@Shameless writes...

"My friend's Lee & Tuesday Burgess along with John Ninnis have made a movie. Hopefully I can persuade them to post regularly on Cult Labs, as they're always busy with some weird movie or other, but until then, here's Lee's piece on their project..."

"Well hello all perverted gore fans.

I have been asked to write a few words on the debut feature from Lee Burgess, John Ninnis and Tuesday Burgess,...

God bless George A. Romero and Dario Argento!

You may be asking yourself “Phill, what the **** are you talking about? You’re reviewing a Lucio Fulci movie!” – And you’d be right? What the **** am I talking about? When Romero and Argento teamed up to create the legendary Dawn of the Dead, not many industry people could foresee the onslaught of imitators that would follow in its wake: due to the fact that most of them believed it would flop! The short sighted, dick-faces!...

Can you imagine being mistaken as a corpse? I don’t mean in a Saturday morning hangover/comedown stylee. I mean being found fully dressed in some shrubs, eyes wide open with your heart beat so faint that any beat would not register on the best heart monitoring apparatus the 70’s had to offer? You can hear fully what people are saying around your lifeless body, but you’re unable to communicate, you’re trapped alone in your thoughts and unable to prevent a thing.

Doesn’t sound...

So, how do you review a film as controversial as Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper? A film that was infamously ordered out of the British Isles by the (at the time) head of the BBFC (British equivalent of the MPAA), James Ferman. He was worried that the content of this movie would push the unstable (read: poor and uneducated) into committing acts of hideous violence, of course it’s all a pile of shit, he just didn’t like the film. Much like he didn’t like The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw...

NoShame Films, I believe, are the company responsible for the recent acceptance of Sergio Martino as a major talent in Italian exploitation: He’s now being mentioned in the same breath as Argento, Fulci and Bava. It’s quiet an achievement for a small label, dedicated to not just exploitation but Italian art-house pictures like Marco Bellochio’s Devil in the Flesh all the way back to Victorio De Sica classics. To think a company held the Giallo up with such esteemed classics is a touching thought....

The Blood Beast Terror





A shaky but fun slice of British Schlock from the Tigon studio, who brought such classics as Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan's Claw to the screen. Although this cheap programmer isn't in the same league as those movies, it's still a good watch for fans of the ropier end of Brit horror thanks to the ridiculous concept of a "were-moth" on a killing rampage, combined with Peter Cushing, as ever remaining quietly dignified...

The Beast Must Die





Extremely naff but riotously funny British horror movie from the mid 70s which features a silly gimmick that B-movie hustler William Castle, producer of prop heavy 50s drive-in shockers like The Tingler, would have been proud of...

This strange horror movie asks the audience at the top of the film to try and identify the lupine fiend responsible for a spate of bloody killings and then pauses for a "Werewolf Break" at...

Peeping Tom





Director Michael Powell went from being a darling of the British film industry to a virtual pariah with this difficult and, at the time of it's release, deeply controversial proto-slasher.

Mark Lewis is a seemingly ordinary young man with an evil secret...he loves to kill women and capture the agonies of their final moments in film. As a child his father, a scientist, performed some nasty experiments on Mark's nervous system...

Near Dark





A compelling and stylish 80s vampire flick that beats The Lost Boys hands down in terms of character, action and gore, Near Dark tells the story of a gang of bloodsuckers who don't come from a noble line of high born vampires. They aren't rich and louche, they never hang out in pricey Gothic nightclubs, there's no great vampiric conspiracy and they don't live in plush penthouses. Near Dark is about white trash vampires, and it's all the more...

Jess Franco's Fu Manchu Movies




Clip from Blood of Fu Manchu


Christopher Lee turns in another couple stern faced performances as the racially dubious Far Eastern criminal mastermind Fu Manchu, a character who would have fitted perfectly into the Bond Movies of the 1960s. At the Helm of these late entries in the Fu Manchu cycle is sleaze kingpin Jess Franco, whose career was peaking at the time thanks to the patronage of Producer Harry...

As I'm slowly gearing up to pick up my scriptwriting in the summer time, I just got thinking about THE single most underrated storyteller of all time, the sound!

I had my first "ear opening" experience at the age of 9 in the winter of 1982 when I listened to the radio play "Die Begegnung mit der Mörder Mumie" ("Encounter with the Killer Mummy") for the first time.
No, it wasn't the first radio play I'd ever heard and it most certainly...

Hanzo the Razor





Having shelled out top dollar for a pricey import, these three notorious and slightly dubious Japanese exploitation movies are now available in the UK.

These are Katzu productions, the same people who brought us the Lone Wolf & Cub (Shogun Assassin) and Lady Snowblood pictures. Hanzo is a samurai police officer in the Edo period of Japanese history. Unlike his fellow officers however, he is above corruption, which causes...

Bad Boy Bubby



A real Australian oddity from the early 90s, Bad Boy Bubby takes that quirky, slightly off kilter style that you find in even the most mainstream of Antipodean movies and runs with it, creating a bleak, sick and funny movie which may well appall some viewers but will find a home with horror fans who have a taste for the bizarre.

Bubby is a bad, bad boy. His mother has kept him locked away for 30 years, telling him that the air outside...

The Witches





More production line horror fun from the Hammer Studio now, with The Witches, a scary vehicle for Actress Joan Fontaine who plays a school teacher struck by a nervous breakdown following an unpleasant run in with voodoo witchcraft while teaching in Africa.

When she returns to Britain she is hired by a rich family to become head teacher at a small private school in an isolated rural village. In classic Hammer style the villagers...

She


Cheesy Hammer entertainment that steps away from horror and attempts to bring the work of H. Rider Haggard to the screen. Haggard wrote many a boys-own adventure romp in the 19th century with books like King Solomon's Mines and She being made into successful movies. She is definitely a kitsch, low budget entry in the canon of high adventure films and tells the dangerous tale of two men discharged from the army after WW1 in Palestine.

One is kidnapped and...

Quatermass and the Pit





Hammer produced an excellent cinematic re-spin of the groundbreaking TV Sci-Fi with this late 60s offering. It's packed with suspense and intelligent writing despite the obvious age of the movie, especially in the special effects department. Anyone seeking out this film will probably be prepared to overlook any creakiness caused by it's elderly status and will hopefully be able to throw themselves right into this spirited and...

Plague of the Zombies





Although not as well known as the studio's Dracula and Frankenstein movies, Hammer's Plague of the Zombies rates as one of their most satisfying productions, managing to balance the delightful camp that we all ironically enjoy 40 years after the fact with some real chills.

Opening on some stereotypical voodoo rituals*, we move swiftly on to James Forbes, a medical professor who has received a letter from a former...

Deep River Savages





Made a good few years before the late 70s / early 80s spate of gut munching cannibal epics, Deep River Savages might be described as a ground breaking feat of cinematic innovation in an alternate universe. On this planet however, it's a tawdry slice of eurotrash exploitation that, although not as graphic as later entries in the genre cycle which upped the atrocity footage to extreme levels, stills packs a nasty punch.
...

Cold Eyes of Fear





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...

Iron Rose





A rather more obscure entry in the Jean Rollin's canon of arty 70s horror movies that drops the dreamy lesbian softcore and vampiric Gothic of his more famous efforts for fog shrouded, creeping menace and bloodless terror. Following a tiring bike ride a young couple on a romantic date sneak into a abandoned tomb to make love but they find themselves trapped for the night surrounded by the graves and crypts of a huge cemetery. They frantically...

Salvation/Redemption Capsule Reviews

From my time writing for a "well known high street chain"...

I won monthly prizes for the sheer volume of reviews I posted to their website. Bearing this in mind, please allow for some repetition in these pieces as they were meant to be viewed by customers browsing individual titles rather than en masse.

Requiem For a Vampire





Vampiric eroticism from French Sapphic bloodsucker...

I'm a Cyborg




The reason so many of us gravitated to extreme Asian Cinema at the turn of the decade must partly have been due to boredom. Weary of the genre rules of Hollywood horror and action movies we searched out new kicks in the form of nerve jangling J-horror ghost yarns, Takashi Miikes surreal and vicious gangster fantasies or the downbeat art-shocks of Kim Ki-Duk.

But, like all new fads, the media led invasion of Far East entertainment...

Empire of the Ants




This trailer is a peach! Note the bold and laughable attempt to align to movie with H.G.Wells.

Marvel at the brilliantly awful giant ants!


Killer ants are on the loose in this fantastically silly shocker from Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, a legend in the world of Drive-In films, who with his company, American International Pictures, produced some of the greatest cinematic trash from the golden era of junk...

Race With The Devil





Peter Fonda was a cultural icon back in the early 70s as the fall out from his groundbreaking feature Easy Rider continued, allowing the actor to work on whatever project he pleased. After teaming up with Warren Oates for the Hippie-Western The Hired Hand, the pair worked together again on this low budget, Drive-in exploitation movie.

Although it keeps any violence or gore to minimum, instead focusing on bike stunts...

City of the Living Dead





Judging a Lucio Fulci movie by the usual standards of a mainstream film magazine or academic criticism is a useless exercise. You either get these flicks or you don't. Fulci's movies are weirdly paced, shoddily dubbed and, in a lot of cases, hard to love, but, whatever genre he was working in (and he covered the whole range of Italian B picture trash), he always bought a certain flair and imagination to his low budget enterprises...

Female Prisoner No.701 Scorpion - Beast Stable




That's the great thing about Japsploitation... Even the Trailer are a work of art!


The third installment of the Prisoner Scorpion saga sees Sasori, the borderline psychotic heroine of the series, on the run from the authorities in a film that reverses the previous format by having The Scorpion fleeing from the law, only returning to jail for the final act.

This change of pace...

Daughters of Satan





You loved him as the Hawaiian shirt rocking P.I. in Magnum...

You shook with laughter when he played the hapless father figure in Three Men & a Little Lady...

Now recoil in horror when yet another famous Hollywood player reveals his seamy exploitation, B-movie horror past as Tom Selleck stars in the early 70s satanic conspiracy thriller, Daughters of Satan.

Don't panic Selleck fans, Tom...

Turkey Shoot (Blood Camp Thatcher)





The Australians know how to make entertaining trash. Something in the national consciousness seems to infuse many of their mainstream movies, like the fantastic Priscilla Queen of the Desert and the glorious camp of Strictly Ballroom, with an off kilter goofiness that naturally lends itself to the seamy end of the cinematic world. When they make trash horror and sci-fi you end up with bizarre concoctions like Mad Max,...

Taxidermia





I've always loved extremity when it comes to cinema. Not for me the pale bloodless horror of mainstream multiplex horror movies. I'll happily sit and watch movies that offend me. I think I want to be shocked, to shake myself out of my jaded cinematic reverie. From the hideous experiment camp horrors of 'Men Behind The sun' to the brutal flip-flop of Rape-Revenge conventions in the French art-shock movie 'Irreversible', the power of film to...

New York Hardcore



Visit the NYHC Myspace here...NYHC

Every city needs a scene where the kids that don't fit can thrive. New York Hardcore is a documentary that examines one such movement, the harsh and brutal bastard offspring of punk rock, metal and Hip-hop that is NY Hardcore. Although in the last decade the style has been diluted by the mainstream, as the rise of Nu-metal took many of the ideas and morphed them into a teen-angst friendly, unit shifting...

Yes, I'm in work and I'm very bored - can you tell?

Here's an essay I completed on Dario Argento, it's not great but it got me the pass I needed! ha.

Hope you enjoy it!

Dario Argento: Broken Mind

I’m going to talk about a man who has had a career outside of the Hollywood machine for almost five-decades. He’s made some of international cinema’s most iconic thrillers and even penned a few classics outside of his favoured...

Here's my two-pence on the sensation that is, Pascal Laugier's Martyrs!

http://www.wildsidecinema.com/533.html

Agree with me? Disagree with me? Want to bite my face off?

Let me know what you think.

Here's an article I wrote for the late, great Joey D over at Wildside.

He seems to have some admirers here, so what the flip? hope you enjoy it.

http://www.wildsidecinema.com/art003.html

Please let me know if there is anything incorrect, or any further info you may have on the great man. Cheers.

As a kid growing up my first love was always slasher movies and even today it's still my most loved sub-genre. Its simplicity is what sets it above films of other genres, I'm open minded when it comes to films and especially when they're in the horror family but with this kind of film it's always so accessible and as a result my first port of call.

If you've been living in a cave for the past few decades then the formula is simple: a group of people get together, normally get drunk,...

If nothing goes awfully wrong, I'll be probably starting to write another radio play for a friend and producer/director in Germany during the summer time.
The only thing, which is still open to me is whether it'll be a darkly humouruos tale about a female assassin and her kid sister OR a very grim audio version of a snowy "Revenge"-Spaghetti Western audio style!
I plan on taking you through the whole process, the character build up, the writing of pitches, treatments...

The Howdy Family





From Left: 'Ribs' Howdy, 'Runt' Howdy, Veranda Howdy, 'Rump' Howdy, Rev. Shrimp Howdy

Sibling Free-Jazz-Punk group "The Howdy Family" are well known for their violently confrontational live shows, which saw Saxophonist Veranda Howdy smashing her instrument into the side of music critic Dick Shunt's head at an infamous gig in London's Denge Club earlier in the year.

Formed by the home schooled Brothers...

Well, I thought I’d jump on the Shameless bandwagon and start posting the odd review in the blogs too! Plus I do have a tendency to write quite long and ramble on a bit (!) so a blog actually seems more appropriate than a thread. So here we go... enjoy!
May contain teeny-weeny spoilers (but I’ll warn you when there’s a biggy! :P )

MARTYRS (2008; Pascal Laugier)





So I got asked to go see this film up London to...