Dante's Other Inferno

This is a different kind of list. It's not a top ten or a "best of" or even a "worst of." It's about how much mind-numbing, pointless pain you are willing and capable of inflicting upon yourself. It has been painstakingly put together to test even the hardiest of MonsterHunter fans. Few will be foolish enough to try it, and even fewer still be conscious at its conclusion. This isn't some trendy list where we giggle about low budgets and bad dubbing. You won't be whupping it up with your friends about how great these movies are in their awfulness. This is the real deal pure and simple. Ten movies. Ten turds. The criteria couldn't have been simpler. Ten Italian movies by ten different Italian directors all insanely boring in their own right, but strung together in a decology of dreck unimagined by any civilized society. All you have do is watch all ten in one sitting. Awake.

Castle Of Blood (1964) - You know you're in trouble right from the get go when the movie is based on an Edgar Allan Poe work that doesn't really exist. Some moron accepts a bet to spend an evening in a haunted castle and encounters a strange painting, a mad scientist who demonstrates his research skills by chopping the head off of a snake, and some flashbacks that fail to inspire much more in the viewer than a good feeling they didn't have to live through them the first time around. Director Antonio Margheriti never gets things out of first gear from the lame set up all the way until the dimwitted ending involving a descendant of the Hangman of London.

Tomb Of Torture (1963) - Keeping things in first gear (if not downshifting to neutral), Antonio Boccaci sends us back to a haunted Italian castle where people are being knocked off. This is one of those movies where characters come and go without rhyme and reason and the ones that do stick around don't matter much to the plot. Despite much of the movie merely being people standing around jawing with each other, nothing is really ever explained. By the time this one finishes though, you'll just be glad something in the movie was abrupt, even if was just the ending. There is an exciting scene of a guy moving a stone block though.

Nightmare Castle (1965) - Lovers are murdered! Blood is drained! Crazy sister of dead wife is married in effort to get hands on inheritance! Butler gets accidentally electrocuted in a bathtub! Viewers vow never to go near a movie featuring an Italian castle ever again! Finishing up our tedious trifecta of dull castle movies, Mario Caiano tries to alleviate the boredom by heaving every bit of plot at you as its ninety minutes will allow. It doesn't help. At all. This one manages to prove that the only thing harder to sit through than old, dull horror movies are old, dull horror movies festooned with unwieldy get rich quick schemes.

Baba Yaga (1973) - Corrado Farina wisely ditches the haunted castle as the basis for his movie, but unwisely chooses an Italian comic book no one ever heard of instead. There's a witch, a strange doll, a killer camera, and a bottomless pit that all add up to a bigger mess then the dog that's also in the movie could likely make. Just in case someone watching was still convinced they knew what was happening, they throw in some dreams about Nazis, and a patented shock ending designed to call into question everything we thought we knew. Which wasn't as much as they probably thought.

The Shunned House (2003) - Director Ivan Zuccon proves that the bad Italian horror movie is just like a cockroach and can survive anywhere and at anytime - even in the 21st century! Ivan pulls out all the stops in his effort to continue this great tradition by strip mining three different H.P. Lovecraft stories for this house that most assuredly should be shunned. Poor use of flashbacks, bottomless pits, a color palate that alternates between brown and brown, and a cast equally dingy all add up to a movie that easily deserves to close out the first half of our fetid festival of foulness.

The Church (1988) - An erstwhile Demons sequel, Michele Soavi's tale of a church (really?) that is the only thing standing between Rome and an invasion of monsters from hell suffers because much of the movie hinges on the fates of people trapped in the church. People that you hate and who have no business being in the church in the first place (other than to be killed by demons). But you also hate how inept the demons from the underworld are because once the church collapses, they can't escape despite the fact that a little girl could. A little girl? Wussiest. Demons. Ever.

Demons 6 (1988) - Did someone mention the Demons film series? Luigi Cozzi picks up a paycheck by busting out both the "evil witch" gimmick and the dreaded "horror movie within a horror movie" gimmick. Mix well with heavy metal songs by White Lion and Bang Tango as well as a plotline involving a broken down refrigerator and a fairy named Sybil and you have a film that makes our first six selections seem like models of lucidity. Throw in gratuitous references to other Italian horror movies by name and an ending that features lasers shooting out of the witch's eyes while our heroine suddenly develops the power to control time and you'll wish she would turn the clock back about 89 minutes.

War Of The Robots (1978) - Once Star Wars came out, Alfonso Brescia easily moved from westerns, amazon movies, and White Fang movies into bargain basement sci-fi. This one featured an astronaut who wore cowboy boots with his spacesuit, robots that wore Andy Warhol wigs, and spaceships equipped with chairs purchased from an office supply store. With a story that basically boils down to rescuing a scientist because he got himself kidnapped from Earth before he could turn his atomic reactor off, even two really fake-looking spacewalks can't stop you from wishing for a breach in the airlock.

Zeder (1983) - Close call as to which Pupi Avati film to list here. A case could easily be made that the longer The House With The Windows That Laughed deserved this spot, but with its early focus on a guy and his typewriter and its later focus on a fat zombie as slow as this movie trying to menace our hero, it wasn't really that close a call at all. Interminable babble about something called K Zones that can bring the dead back to life can't possibly bring the viewer back to life. I first saw this movie 15-20 years ago and not a day doesn't go by that I don't cringe thinking about how glassy-eyed it made me.

Voices From Beyond (1990) - If you've haven't clawed your eyes out or cleaned your ears with broken beer bottles by now, you're on the home stretch. But we aren't letting up. Lucio Fulci's second-to-last movie reveals a director who should have been making his second-to-last movie about ten movies before. With a story involving a woman investigating her dad's death after glass was found in his colon, Lucio resorts to absurd dream sequences and the daughter talking to her dead dad to get things done. Lots of sluggishness ensues during his funeral when everyone has flashbacks about what a jerk he was. Not to put too fine a point on things, but the girl who starred in this was also listed in the credits of Demons 6. Eighth.