Blind Date (1984)

Another of Greek director Nico Mastorakis's films for Omega Pictures. Joseph Bottoms (The Black Hole) stars as a man who goes blind following an accident. Doctors find nothing wrong with his eyes and so offer him an experimental method of sight using brain electrodes and a computer like walkman device which enables him to see electronic outlines of objects in his brain. Meanwhile a taxi driver is abducting and murdering young women by performing amateur surgery on them. Naturally the two strands of the story converge into one come the last third of the film.

Mastorakis was on a fine streak of film making in his days with Omega Pictures. Blind Date is a stylish horror thriller with added sci-fi elements. Quite disturbing in places, the kills, although blood is never seen, are protracted scenes and quite methodical and sleazy in their approach.

However for all the Giallo-esq murders the experimental sight device Bottoms uses is quite primitive in it's use and dodgy to say the least as he can only make out lines and going off the dialogue the lines don't appear immediately should he turn his head quickly. All well and good but none of this seems to matter during a car chase along the busy Athens streets.

Mastorakis in only his second film after Island of Death brings together a good cast in the aforementioned Bottoms, Keir Dullea, Kirstie Alley and Marina Sirtis of soon to be Star Trek fame. As a nice exploitation trick he also manages to get each of his many actresses, including Alley, to go topless at some stage or another, mainly in their death scenes.

THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED. ( 1969 )
A young girl is sent to a reform school for wayward girls, and soon finds a strictly run home full of sexual tension and severe punishments. Complete with a peeping Tom son and a head of the school with some strange feelings of her own. Then the killings start…
Aka LA RESIDENCIA, this Spanish flick has a great reputation and it’s easy to see why it’s held in such high regard. Beautifully filmed, this gothic gem is like Hammer Films doing a Giallo.
Lovely presentation of the full international version from Arrow.

THE SUNDAY WOMAN. ( 1975 )
A man gets bludgeoned to death with a large clay phallus ( no, really ). Jean Louis Tritingnant and Jaqueline Bisset are the main suspects in this Giallo like film, where everyone seems to have something to hide. Great performances all round here and great to discover a movie I’d never seen before.
Plus, there aren’t many movies that include dialogue such as “ You broke 18 of my cocks! “
This Blu Ray ( my first purchase from Radiance ) looks stunning. Here’s hoping they have more borderline Gialli ( or actual Gialli ! ) on their books.

Two fine write ups of recently released movies, thanks Mojo for bringing The Sunday Woman to my attention. Sounds good.

Cheers, Dem. It was only when I noticed it was in Volume 2 of Troy Howarth’s ‘ So Sweet So Perverse’ Giallo book that I decided to buy it. Let’s be honest, if something like IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE can go into peoples’ Giallo collection, then so can this!

I really like Hurricane. :lol:

Bully. 2018

Over weight teen Jimmy and two of his friends are constantly bullied by the school jock. After a encounter with a former boxer, Jimmy decides to train and fight back.

I'm sure we enjoy seeing bullies getting a bit of karma in any way shape or form, Tucker Albrizzi plays the shy Jimmy who has some over bearing parents and meets Action Jackson Ron Canada who introduces him to Danny Trejo and toughened him up. There are some good moments with laughter with one guy commenting on a fight to his friend and basically calls someone a 'fairy kid' and gets scolded for it. The acting is decent but think the makers wanted to make a comedy then switched it to drama and back to comedy, but you got to ask yourself where were the teachers when a few things are going on?

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It’s ok. It’s more that it’s one of those films that is arguably not a straight down the line Giallo. It’s still in my Giallo collection though!

Yeah it's simply a thriller. Never seen a Giallo to be honest.

Manhunt (2007) (Orig title Rovdyr)

Grueling Norwegian survival horror set in 1974 in which four young people are hunted in remote woods by a band of backwoods locals.

In truth there's nothing here that you won't have seen before and the plot is quite conventional. What is different is the whole thing is laugh free. There's no humour, no camp thrills, Don't go looking for fun here, for Manhunt is an atmospheric horror film, with a slow burn beginning that transforms into something that is hard to watch on the lines of Last House on the Left with relentless terror and brutality.

A film from the same era of splatter as Severance, Botched and Wilderness, that i keep coming back to time and again.

Manhunt would never have survived the 80's uncut. Recommended to those who enjoy Backwoods Horror

The same place they were in my damn school thirty years ago. Turning a comfortably blind eye.

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