Night Of The Demon. 1980.

A anthropologist takes some of his students to the backwoods to investigate a state of killings.

First time seeing this very low budget, bad acting from those alive and those who are being killed by the beast of the woods, yet for some reason I couldn't turn away from it. The deaths are a bit decently done and laughable, this is the film that gave us bigfoot picking up a man in a sleeping bag and practising his hammer throwing or a guy taking a leak and loosing the family jewels. The back story to the killings are split up but are told by the same guy who tries his best to act scared while telling them. something that will be watched again.

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NOTD I've watched on vhs, dvd etc and this is the best I've seen it look tbh. You'll be watching it again soon methinks ... it's that kind of flick ....

Ahem.

A double double bill this time, same year and Bo Svenson's in both :lol:
Purely unintentional you understand ....

The Curse II: The Bite (1989, "Fred Goodwin" ... Franco Prosperi)

Screamingly unconnected to the first one, a couple find there's more to life than saving some mileage along the way.
Quite as crazed as the original for aw that, just in a different way. The Primark Demi Moore and some clod find no respite from the road in this backwater. FX by Screaming Mad George, so you know it's gonna get gloopy.
Recommended.


Beyond The Door III (Jeff Kwitny)

Yes, it's Amok Train :laugh:
Bo does an accent this time, so form that orderly queue folks! Quite the maddest flick tbh. The dialogue is presented in such a stilted way that it should really have been dedicated to the Stiglitz :nod::lol:
A bunch of types take a cheap holiday in other people's misery and pay the dearest price of all. Spectacularily gaudy in the way we love, this had me entertained right up to the end.
Ahem.

It will be re-watched soon and probably next week :lol:

The Shriek Show dvd of this is really good. Nice image quality and an enjoyable 45 minutes or so chat with producer Assonitis. Those Yugoslavian landscapes really give the film something extra don't they?

The Ninth Configuration. 1980.

A castle that is used for a mental asylum for soldiers, psychiatrist Kane lets the inmates act out their fantasies but is unsure what is real and what isn't.

Based on the book by William Peter Blatty, will admit this was a intense read and didn't want to put the book down. Classed as somewhat sequel to The Exorcist, but has no ghost, demons or possession even though Jason Miller makes a appearance as a different character, it does focus on a party guest from the film, the one who Ragan says "your going to die up there before she marks her territory on the carpet.

There is some good acting from Stacey Keach, Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders, Neville Brand, Moses Gunn who comes dressed as a Superhero. This does have a great atmosphere around it, a castle in the middle of nowhere with a thick mist surrounding it. Blatty does his usual while writing a serious movie adds in some comedy that doesn't go over the top and is done a tastefully. Right from the start to the end this was basically almost had me from the edge of the sofa to the floor.

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It is a change from the usual sights certainly. Eerie in places ....

"Hail Caesar!!"

REWATCH.

Moonfall (2022, Roland Emmerich)

Well twas this or some Bollywood SF epic :lol:

Ro-land returns with a vengeance.
Patrick Wilson sings Toto .... I nearly put it off :laugh:
Outstripping Don't Look Up for sheer silliness, this tale of doom and gloom takes in yer conspiracy theories and your denial of physical reality in spades. It should look fun on the big screen etc.
A series of contrivances mean that a disgraced astronaut gets a chance to redeem himself in that way that makes you groan and gasp at the same time.

BODY COUNT – I like Euro takes on American slashers, which is what this is. Helmed by no less of a personage than Ruggero Deadato, but you can forget ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, ‘Body Count’ isn’t nasty or intense; it’s fun. Apart from Ruggero, I spotted many other Eurotrash and exploitation ‘names’ on the roll call – David Hess, Mimsy Farmer, Ivan Rassimov, even Charles bloody Napier. The plot – a campsite, a vanful full of pesky kids, various blade-based implements, but then something bad has happened and it’s fifteen years later. David Hess looks hard. The film looks cheap but plays kooky. As with ‘Bloody Moon’, the Euro-element throws in a curveball, weirds the tone, cuts the safety ropes, or at least wears them through them a little. The image of a teddy bear recurs with a sing-song nursery motif, giallo-style. The killer looks monstrous. ‘Body Count’ only ever makes crude moves, but those moves have an air of giddiness about them. There’s unlikely nudity in the world’s skankiest bathroom. This nudity isn’t the most unlikely thing about said bathroom as behind the mirror lurks the spirit of an ancient shaman! Well, it was clearly pointed out that the campsite was built on the site of a Native American burial ground, so OK. ‘Body Count’ rolls along amiably, a bit like a satisfying camping trip. When the inane dialogue flows and people strip inexplicably and awkwardly, it’s given a bit of punch by Claudio Simonetti in ‘Demons’-type mode. It loses something when it gets bogged down in the complexities of David Hess’s dire marriage, but it never wanders too far from slasher baseline. ‘Body Count’, you know the type by now. Someone needs to give us a blu ray.

:hail::hail::hail::hail::hail:

I remember a horribly truncated vhs, so yes a BD of this would be nice :nod:

House Of The Long Shadows. 1980.

A American novelist is given a bet that he can't write a story in 24 hours with a £20.000 wager, all he asks is somewhere quiet. His publicist tells him of a manor house and he can go there, once there he meets a assortment of people who are connected to the house.

Aside from this being a Cannon production, they must have put in a few bob or two to get Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine to headline this quint horror. Set in a rural place on Wales in a dark Gothic Mansion makes the perfect setting for peace and quiet to focus on work and finding the house not quite empty. Dark Atmosphere from entering the house to leaving makes it more enjoyable with four great horror movie legends. Thank you Mr Dem for recommending this.

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Glad you enjoyed it, Mr.B. :pop2:

I certainly did even the Mrs sat through it all, not muttering a word, good sign she enjoyed it.:pop2::pop2:

She has good taste. :cool:

Of course she does...that's why we been together for so many years :pound::pound:

Ambulance

Jake Gyllenhaal and his Brother rob a Bank but end up stealing an Ambulance along with kidnapping a Paramedic and a wounded Cop. They end up being chased by Police in Los Angeles. It's a Michael Bay Film so you know what to expect and even though it's overlong and has shaky camera shots. It's actually pretty decent. Worth a watch when it hits Home Entertainment.

Locked Down

A Detective is framed and sent to Jail where Gangster Vinnie Jones is running a Cage Fighting operation. The acting is woeful but I like it, it's my sort of Film. The Soundtrack was rather distracting though.

X

Set in 1979, A Porn Crew rent a place on a Rural Farm to shoot their Film but encounter the 2 elderly owners. It takes a while for the violence to start but you do see them making the Movie beforehand. I thought that it was slightly weird but not a complete head scratcher. Worth a watch if you like the Trailer.

And yes Britany Snow is certainly in this (She does sing like Pitch Perfect.

Does this get confusing and/or weird?

I was going to watch this as I thought the Trailer looked ok. However I saw the ending and thought no.

I read the book first to see what I was gonna get into with the film, never found neither the book or film weird or confusing both written perfectly and well directed film.

It's his usual schtick. I did wonder if he'd just remade Moon 44 (haven't seen trailer) before I put it on :laugh:

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MARY MAGDALENE (2018)

Biblical story of the days leading up to the crucifiction as seen through the eyes of Mary of Magdala.
The movie attemps to fill in the gaps not mentioned in the bible and put right the wrongs that have been made about her.
When i first saw this movie a few years ago, with so much going on in my life I thought it was just an okay movie. Last night I watched it again with a clear state of mind and thought it was very good. I really enjoyed it.
Really good perfomances and a nice music score.

I hadn't heard of this before so I had a quick look and saw it's directed by Garth Davis, the man who helmed Lion (2016) and stars Rooney Mara as Mary Magdalene, Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus Christ, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter, and Tahar Rahim as Judas. That's an impressive array of acting talent, so I'll keep an eye out for a reasonably priced Blu-ray.

Blood Feast (1963)

"Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror" claims the poster.

Well they weren't wrong there. HG Lewis's film is considered the first splatter movie and it is a delightfully bloody feast but although it's very gory it's also extremely fake with the special effects mainly consisting of draping butchers left overs on womens bodies. How the BBFC actually banned this i'll never know.

But at least the murders are fun and watchable. The rest of the film is abysmal, mainly consisting of two cops sat in the corner of the room discussing the murders and trying to figure them out - Before anyone asks, no it's not giallo-esq - or even worse, a young woman named Suzette boring us to tears about a dinner party being held in her honour (Which eventually turns out to be said blood feast). Suzette is played by Playboy pin up Connie Mason, and sadly for the viewer she's a truly terrible actress. Everyone else is bad but Mason is dire bordering on unwatchable.

The story for what it's worth focuses on a psycho caterer named Ramses who dismembers women so he can use their body parts in his cooking as ritualistic sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar.

So, whilst the gore scenes are so bad they are genuinely good the rest of the film is just so bad it's bad. Arrow's Blu-ray release of this proves that you can actually polish a turd because it looks far better than this film deserves.

I enjoy the terrible acting haha, I know a lot of people do but it also puts a lot off as well! Like you said at least it’s peppered with some pretty entertaining murder scenes!

'Blood Feast' is a great film

Great last line. :nod:


To The Limit (1995, Raymond Martino)

Another Anna Nicole Smith actioner.
Our gal is a CIA operative this time. The plot is some mish mash involving the Mafia and Vietnam :lol:. She gets nude twice within the first ten minutes ....
The body count is plentiful and the linking scenes had some of the poorest audio yet.
Great ending, which made us cry with the laughter and rewind twice to bask in its unexpectedness :laugh:

The trailer is better than the movie, lol takes to long to start, and even after that manages to drags a lot.. A prequel is coming btw

I was going to watch it this weekend even though I thought it was a bad trailer, I thought maybe the film would be better. Might just forget about it haha!

Land Of Doom (1986, Peter Maris)

Poapoc caper filmed in Turkey for once.
A young woman and a fugitive team up for expediencies sake in a barren wasteland surrounded by mobile scum of all sorts, mainly rapists cough.
Crazed and riddled with tropes, the action is plentiful, if a tad piecemeal due to static camera work, and to top it off the head of this clan is a Primark Richard Lynch to boot, just adding to the general mayhem. :nod::):pop2:
I will say that the ST is ... something else ahem.

The Secret of the Red Orchid (1962)

I thought i'd rewatch this German Krimi starring Christopher Lee seeing as Severin are releasing it on Blu-ray as part of the second volume of Christopher Lee films.

Quite honestly it's dire. The English subtitles, lacking Lee's voice, are amusing to begin with but soon become tedious in the extreme and in truth i can't rememebr a thing about it despite only watching it last night other than it's set in London. It lacks suspense and... oh forget it. The only reason anyone might want to see this is an early staring role for lovely Marisa Mell.

I won't be wasting any money on the second Christopher Lee Eurocrypt set that's guaranteed.

SHEPHERD – An angsty guy relocates to a remote island to be a shepherd. Moving forward, we see he’s on the run from something in his past; sinister Kate Dickie often pops up to remind him of this very fact as she stares long and hard with her milky dead eye. ‘Shepherd’ is heavy on atmosphere but a little clumsy in places. Photography and sound design are often pristine, and yet emphasis – crucial in any attempt to play it spectral and subtle – is sometimes fumbled, with obvious builds and cues that are too on-the-nose. It’s also hard to avoid feeling that ‘Shepherd’ is falling back on narrative cliches when we hear the character ask “What’s going on? Am I dead?” yet again, or when a few weird scenes give way to more standard ‘avenging ghost’ type stuff. The makers had obviously seem and partly ingested ‘The Lighthouse’. Now, that’s an odd movie, peerlessly strange, and it casts its shadow over this lesser product. But ‘Shepherd’ is strong visually, some of the imagery is nice, and there’s plenty to intrigue, such as an unrecognisable Greta Scacchi. Aside from those aspects that I found flawed, I enjoyed it overall and would say it’s worth a watch.

THE BLACK ROOM – Somewhere up in the Hollywood hills, a brother and sister keep a shadowy room where people come to play… you really wish someone would set the world straight about ‘The Black Room’, a sorely neglected early eighties horror that seems to have slipped by along the way. At its heart is quite a serious meditation on fantasy and the damage it can cause if its place in a relationship isn’t understood, but the trappings are those of a post-Cronenberg vampire movie. Its murky atmosphere is matched by few other films from around the time, and the layers of stylisation, from the photography to the spacey score, create a feeling of bad-dream detachment unequalled by, say, the more exaggerated artifice of something like the following year’s ‘The Hunger.’ Somebody out there… but I’m guessing there’s a reason it hasn’t been given ‘the treatment’, as it would make such an obvious choice for so many of today’s labels, boutique or not.

ICED – Another bad slasher. They seemed to get worse as the eighties progressed – this one’s from ’89, so it’s going for broke in terms of badness (if nothing else). The ‘action’ happens at a ski resort where people have gathered to talk AT LENGTH and maybe commemorate their dead friend, who of course doesn’t turn out to be the slasher, not that they liked him much anyway. Why is it worth seeing? Well, it’s majestically bad, and drips with the juicy ‘offness’ of only the ripest fruit. Long stretches in which characters as stiff as boards ‘relate’ are interrupted by weird angles and apparently pointless stabs at atmospheric lighting – that long moose shadow, why? But then it’s equally pointless to even ask the question about a film where someone in a kitchen starts working out with a barbell mid-sentence. The examples of that kind of thing are as endless as the log cabin interiors, and really do create the impression that ‘Iced’ is the eighties slasher equivalent of a dull Magritte painting in the background of a ‘Habitat’ advert. Where do you go with that? Ultimately, you either submit to the film’s incessant surge of plastic unreality or you turn it off. Most slasher enthusiasts will do the latter, but not until they realise that the anaemic kills are crammed into the last twenty minutes or so left after the film’s ‘anthemic build’. Stalwart fans of the weird will be happy just to scratch their heads.

Perhaps the company execs all think "Didn't Eureka release that as part of their Karloff at Columbia set?" and dismiss it. :lol:

I know when i saw it in your review i thought "Cool, Frankie's watching the classics on the thirties and forties for a change"

I was wrong.

Devil Dog. 1978.

A dog terrorizes the inhabitants of a suburban street.

Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimieux, Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, play the happy family "The Barry's" who adopt a Alsatian dog and name it lucky but those around the dog aren't so lucky as the dog was used in a black mass ritual and possessed by Satan.

We have had a 12 year old girl possessed, the anti-christ on earth in the form of Damien, possessed houses so why not a dog, treated right and they can become man's best friend, not this one. Made for T.V. this isn't a big budget movie, we only see the after effects of some killings and quirky sarcastic comments and Mr Crenna trying to shot a dog. This isn't as thrilling as it is made to be but enjoyable enough to keep me quiet.

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Cruise Into Terror. 1978.

A Egyptian sarcophagus is on board a pleasure cruise and the passengers begin to behave strangely.

Another made for T.V. movie set on board a cruise ship that seems to have a small amount of people on it (budget restraints maybe??) This had a dark atmosphere surrounding it and a tense pace of claustrophobia done with some decent directing and cinematography. The acting isn't that bad even Dirk Benedict is trying to be the horror movie survivor and Christopher George seems a bit out of place but manages to fit in. Hugh O'Brian plays the ship's captain who feels something is off with his new cargo but can't bring himself to believe it. It's not great but not terrible either.

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Iced! That takes me back now ....

:hail::hail::hail:

Airport 75. A light plane crashes into a 747, incapacitating the pilot and killing the co-pilots, and leaving the head stewardess (Karen Black) in charge of the plane. Charlton Heston and George Kennedy star in this sequel to the original 1970 flick, which leans more into the disaster movie formula but is just as enjoyable. Thoroughly entertaining. :nod:

I think it's hilarious how Heston enters the plane. Through the cockpit window. Superb stuff.

A lot of fun.

Breakout (1975)

An oddball actioner starring Charles Bronson as a small time pilot paid to rescue Robert Duvall from a Mexican jail by Duvall's wife as played by Jill Ireland.

At first i wasn't sure if this was being played for laughs but it improved as time went on and although the film was hardly gripping it still entertained. At first due to it's quirkyness and then thanks to a well filmed aerial escape from the prison involving a chopper, a plane and Randy Quaid pretending to rape Sheree North (Don't judge until you've seen it) in a thrilling climax.

Shot entirely on location, the Indicator Blu-ray looked rather pretty.

Torture Garden (1967)

American horror / fantasy author Robert Bloch adapts four of his stories for this second Amicus portmanteau feature, skillfully directed by Hammer stalwart Freddie Francis.

The wraparound story features Burgess Meredith as a flamboyant carnival sideshow entertainer who encourages four of his guests to witness 'real horror', namely unpleasant glimpses into their own futures.

The first story - Enoch - is a suitably macabre piece about a greedy young man who plans to steal his elderly uncle's savings, however he doesn't reckon on the demonic cat that lives in the basement which has a penchant for eating it's victims heads. A tight and tension ridden piece, Enoch is a lot of fun.

Unfortunately things go downhill after that. The next two tales about the trappings of celebrity and a haunted piano are quite unmemorable and rather dull.

However the final story The Man Who Collected Poe makes up for earlier failings and is worth the entrance fee alone. Starring Peter Cushing in a role possibly best described as a sorcerer, who brings the body of the great author Edgar Allan Poe back from the grave albeit in a seemingly comatose state, and Jack Palance as an avid Poe collector with his own horrific agenda. Cushing adds a classy gravitas to proceedings and is ably supported by the icy Palance. The Man Who Collected Poe is a real tale of terror and one of the best in any Amicus movie.

Overall Torture Garden is an enjoyable watch with it's strengths lying in it's opening and closing tales.

The Indicator Blu-ray is, like all Amicus films i've seen so far, not the strongest as far as high definition picture quality goes but it is a step up from the dvd certainly. The piano story, Mr. Steinway which although filmed in colour is primarily black and white in it's classy art-deco appearance, looks lovely.

There's a good name dropping interview with author Ramsay Campbell about Bloch's work and a fascinating 25 minute interview with Kim Newman about the film. I say interview, there don't appear to be any camera cuts whatsoever and he basically just talks for 25 minutes straight.

Roxanne

Steven Martin plays a fire chief of a small town , with a huge hooter, he falls in love with the beautiful Roxanne who only sees him as a friend , a mordern telling of cyrano de bergerac story even Martin's characters name is a play on words - CD Bales.

The Batman

Well better than I was expecting and Patterson wasn't half bad but could of been a good 45 plus minutes shorter, also was zero chemistry between batman and Catwoman.

Suburban commando

Hulk Hogan plays. Intergalactic bounty hunter Shep Ramesy who ends up stranded on earth after his latest mission and becomes involved in the lives of Christopher Lloyd and his family. Look out for the undertaker as another bounty hunter. Enjoyable if a shallow as puddle.

Let the right one in.

12 old Oscar is bullied loner who befriends a strange young girl with a dark secret, she just happens to be a vampire , part adolescent love story and part horror. A fantastic and well acted film will be watching the remake sometime this week.

The Martian

Matt Damon plays a astronaut who is left behind on Mars and we follow his efforts to survive and the mission to bring him home. Gripping and inspiring.


Now watching Witness (1985)