MonsterHunter

I have a lot of fantasies about how the world will end. It kind of goes with the territory of feeling disenfranchised with life and having no control over anything except occasionally your bowels. Usually these fantasies are some variation of me waking up on a warm sunny day to find that everyone I hate has been killed in an SUV rollover or been bludgeoned to death in their trailer by a guy who resembles me (hey - how did that guy also get my ball bat?) while all the people that I like are dropping by my house sucking up and telling me what a swell Joe I am and how would I like to go to Six Flags with them? Read More »

Anytime the slightly feminine guy you rent your isolated villa from says that he is going off to Kuwait to work on his rich daddy’s oil rig and then chicks start getting killed off at your house, you should probably just forget about getting your security deposit back and just boogie on down to the Holiday Inn Express. I’m always impressed with the courage the main character demonstrates by staying in the house, even after mysterious women start disappearing, counter tops develop gouges from butcher knives and blood droplets start appearing everywhere. Read More »

Supposedly director Lucio Fulci lifted the concept of the movie Carrie for this tale of an ugly chick who is tricked by her peers, accidentally run over, goes into a coma, develops strange mental powers (despite being brain dead), and uses a new student to get her sweet revenge. I’m not going to rap Fulci for emulating Carrie though, mainly because I’ve never seen Carrie. Read More »

This is the alien invasion movie that bowlers have been waiting for! The original Alien was a pretty good little film. It had atmosphere, cool monster, gooey special effects, and even a cyborg! But it left a lot of us keglers feeling like it was that spare we had to settle for after failing to pick up the strike in the tenth frame. Sure, you had an alien on the rampage in deep space and all, but where in the heck was all the bowling? How much more dramatic would it have been if the alien was trying to eat Ripley while she was in the middle of trying to bowl 300? Crud! I just soiled myself thinking about the tension! Read More »

By the time American Rickshaw came out in 1990, the salad days of the Italian trash movie were just about finished. To be sure there were some excellent examples of the form still coming out at this time including Lucio Fulci’s Demonia, Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons, and Bruno Mattei’s Shocking Dark, but you didn’t see the sheer quantity from the Italians like you used to. Read More »

Proving once again that old saw that anything Hollywood can do successfully, the Italians can do cheaper and with Antonio Margheriti, Ark Of The Sun God starring David Warbeck is Rome’s low-budget rip of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. However, what AOTSG lacks in originality and funding, it makes up with in Trans-Am chases. That’s only one of several personal stamps that Antonio (showing up here in the credits in his American secret identity of Anthony M. Dawson) leaves on this movie like the bootprint of a Bruno Maglia knock-off. Read More »

Hindsight being what it is, I don’t imagine that I should have ever thought that a movie starring a guy named Rik Von Nutter and Gaby Farinon would be anything above “worst movie about a runaway space station ever” status. If Rik and Gaby never had the good sense to change their names to something that didn’t immediately make me think that this was some type of send up of movies about runaway space stations, then why would I think they had any ability to judge scripts? Read More »

The beauty of this job (and trust me - after a teeth-grinder like this one, it is most assuredly a job) is that you’ll find yourself in some of the most bizarre of situations. Thus it is that I am forced to complain about something that I would have never thought myself capable of just a few short months ago: where the hell was Umberto Lenzi in this mess? Read More »

Baron Blood tells the tale of an American guy with 70s wardrobe, hair, and sideburns going to Austria while taking some time off after finally getting his master’s degree. It seems that his ancestors are from there and he wanted to check out some of the family in the old country. He meets up with an uncle, a professor of something, played by Joseph Cotton. Apparently they couldn’t get Vincent Price, so they had to “settle” for Joseph Cotton. Cotton was just some guy who was also in Citizen Kane , The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil , among other pictures. Vincent Price starred in The Fly. Read More »

If you’ve ever read the real estate section of your local paper, you’ve seen the ads: Great starter home! 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, attached garage, coven of zombie witches, excellent schools, $229,000. Built on the scene of a horrific witch burning centuries ago, this history-infused charmer has been retrofitted with central air and is wired for cable. Though thoroughly modern in its amenities, the gateway to hell located on the second floor still functions! Perfect for families with small children who are not too attached to old-world notions of souls! Read More »

According to the Internet Movie Database, in less than thirty years, Joe D’Amato managed to get credit for directing some 198 movies. Beyond The Darkness is probably his most famous one. If you’ve never heard of D’Amato or this movie, you may be more familiar with Jurassic Pork, Robin Hood: Thief of Wives, or The Erotic Adventures of Aladdin X. He also lent his directing talents in some capacity to Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Contamination .7 if your tastes run towards something other than obscure Italian adult knock-offs of major Hollywood films. He’s probably the only director who could make a movie called Endgame and you wouldn’t be able to guess if it was a porno or a post-apocalyptic adventure without actually watching it. Read More »

Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons is notable because it’s a zombie movie where even the zombies can’t act. When you think about it, that’s really a hard thing to accomplish. I mean, how hard is it to shamble around with glop dripping off your face while some ugly, no-name starlet is tripping over some imaginary tree stump in the front yard of her isolated Brazilian villa? For the six guys they pulled out of the mission and dressed up in fake eyeballs, it turned out to be nigh impossible. Read More »

Black Sabbath is an anthology film by Mario Bava (Planet of the Vampires, Baron Blood) consisting of three different stories. I’ve always admired the people who make anthology films and those that write short stories. It’s ten times harder and you don’t get any of the respect that practitioners of the longer form books/movies have. Who are our best known authors? Novelists. What are the most popular movies? Not anthologies. And the thing is, that the people doing these multistory projects have to work harder because they can’t rely on just a single trite idea and then pad it out for 95 minutes. No, they have to come up with something like 3 trite ideas and hurry up and squeeze them in to 30 minute segments. Read More »

Barbara Steele must have had it in her contracts to appear in as many scenes in a movie as possible because here she is again playing a dual role. When we last checked up on her in the Nightmare Castle, she was playing twin sisters in a film best described as subpar. You may recall in that flick that it was her wigs that did most of the acting for her and she didn’t really impress all that much. In Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (Mask of Satan if you’re to believe the opening credits - of course if you believed them, you would think that Ms. Steele’s name is spelled “Steel.”), she plays a witch/vampire (the film was never clear on which she was) princess named Asa as well as her descendant, Princess Katia. Read More »

Mickey Hargitay was a body builder who starred in Hercules Vs. The Hydra, Delirium, and a couple of other Italian schlock flicks, but the most impressive item on his resume is that he was once the husband of Jayne Mansfield. He puts all that vital experience to use in Bloody Pit Of Horror as a guy that runs around shirtless in red tights, torturing and killing the folks who just wanted to use his castle to do some cheesecake photo shoots for a horror anthology they were working on. Read More »

I don’t think that Richard really wanted to be governor all that badly. Sure, he was giving interviews, holding court in his fancy office shuffling files while advising his secretary he was not to be disturbed, and having cocktail party receptions, but I don’t think his heart was in it. And I sure know his dingus wasn’t in it either! Because it kept getting into his stripper/singer girlfriend when his old lady was out of town at her mother’s! Read More »

And on the sixth day, God created Trash! And it was good. Especially his hair! That’s right Trashers, Mark Gregory hits the big screen yet again, this time portraying the greatest role of all time, the very first man! Well, after his role as Trash in Bronx Warriors, his role as Johnny Hondo in War Bus Commando, and his role as Thunder in all three Thunder films! Still, playing Adam looks damn good on his resume, too. It certainly plays to his strength of standing around with a stupefied look on his face. After all, everything is new to Adam, so when he acts like a confused five year old when Eve announces she’s making a baby, it’s completely believable! Read More »

Bronx Executioner effortlessly takes its place in the pantheon of awesome post-apocalyptic Italian movies set in the Bronx! And it does it without being particularly post-apocalyptic and not really being set in the Bronx! Sure, the movie’s opening shots feature a nice tour of recognizable New York City landmarks and I think the Bronx Executioner himself had a badge that identified him as a New York cop, but the bulk of the action took place on mounds of dirt and a large derelict country villa that looked distinctly Italian. The post-apocalyptic aspect is likewise quite limited and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but what it lacks in sense, it makes up for in guys rolling down mounds of dirt! That’s a trade off I’ll make every time! Read More »

The difference between an American movie that kicks off a wave of films that the Italians milk until that particular cinema udder is really, really chapped and its imitators can be found in the names of the main characters in this movie and the one that it “borrowed” its “inspiration” from. In Escape From New York Kurt Russell played a guy who had to rescue the President from New York City which had been turned into a maximum security prison. Kurt’s name in the film was Snake. In this movie Mark Gregory has to protect the daughter of a CEO in a Bronx that the government has abandoned to its own devices. His name is Trash. Indeed. Read More »

When we last left headband-clad biker tough Trash at the end of Bronx Warriors, he was wandering the wreckage of his beloved Bronx after firing a grappling hook into Vic Morrow and briefly lamenting the death of the girl who had first caused him to rip off the plot of Escape From New York. Read More »

So much of the Vietnam POW experience is portrayed in a negative light. There’s the obscene physical abuse as well as the unrelenting mental torture. There’s the inhuman living conditions and the years away from loved ones. There’s the uncertainty of whether you are going to live through the next morning or whether you’re going to get another meal. Then, even if there is a rescue mission mounted by a one man killing machine named Rambo or Braddock, there’s the distinct possibility that you might be one of the anonymous grubby guys who dies in the escape attempt. Read More »

In his earlier Strip Nude For Your Killer, director Andrea Bianchi (Massacre) harnessed man’s deep-seated fear of fat guys in tighty-whities to scare us into dropping our Twinkies and Moonpies lest tons of fashion models get killed by dudes in motorcycle outfits. With Burial Ground, Bianchi raises the stakes, turns it up a notch, and takes terror to a terrifying new freaking level by setting an army of Etruscan zombies loose on a bunch of dirty old sods and horny skanky sluts! Read More »

You probably shouldn’t come out of a movie about Vietnam thinking that you would have rather really been in Vietnam than watched the movie. That just doesn’t seem right. Then again, you shouldn’t come out of a Camillo Teti movie thinking that you would have rather really been watching his Cobra Mission 2. That’s just plain crazy talk. This is probably the first Nam movie that will trigger post traumatic stress disorder in people who never fought there. Read More »

A couple of observations about Vietnam vets and post traumatic stress disorder need to be made after watching this odd hybrid of the Italian cannibal and Rambo genres. It probably would be better for your mental well-being if you are having flashbacks about how crappy the war was, specifically when your hometown buddies take a bite out of your arm when you’re rescuing them from a tiger cage, if your bedroom wasn’t adorned with photos from the war, including a really nicely framed and matted picture of a bunch of stuff blowing up. Read More »

A woman goes down to the Amazon with her brother and her best friend so that she can find proof that cannibalism never has occurred and is in fact just a cruel myth. How do you prove a negative? Let’s say she goes down there and doesn’t see any cannibalism. What does that prove? Only that on that particular day at that particular time she didn’t see any. I was never real sure about whether she had thought through this whole thing as far as her research methods go, but since this is an Italian gutmuncher I was prepared to suspend my disbelief on that count at least. Read More »

Today was one of those days that I decided to tie up a bunch of nagging loose ends. After moving to this great state six years ago, I finally went and got myself a driver’s license. I had been avoiding doing it because I heard something about taking a stupid written test and since I had a valid license from my old home state, I was outraged that that wasn’t good enough. Read More »

Car Crash is the single best 1970s movie of 1980! This film from Antonio Margheriti (Ark Of The Sun God, Jungle Raiders) stars two of the biggest names of the decade - Trans Am and Travolta! Trans Am riveted the nation with his performance in the various Smokey And The Bandit films where he single-handedly carried the annoyingly smug Burt Reynolds to super stardom. John Travolta was practically the entire late 70s himself with his TV show, singing career, Grease, and Saturday Night Fever! Clearly, John was pretty busy and if you thought he’d find time to pick up a $700 check for an Italian movie about a big time demolition derby, then up your nose with a rubber hose, Sweathog! The Italians though were experts at tapping into what they perceived to be popular in American culture and then delivering the absolutely palest of imitations. Thus we find ourselves watching John’s brother Joey in the starring role! Read More »

This is based on the classic Edgar Allan Poe work called Danse Macabre. Coming out in the mid-sixties around the same time as all those Roger Corman and Vincent Price Poe films, it was understandable that the Italians wanted in on some of that action. What is less understandable is why they based their movie on a work by Edgar Allan Poe that didn’t actually exist. I’m guessing there’s some spooky, supernatural reason for this. Maybe this is based on a work that Poe’s ghost might have written if the curse that was laid down on his family hadn’t resulted in his castle collapsing into the sea while the strange painting of his ancestor yawned mightily. I think I saw that in a documentary about Poe that starred Vicent Price. Read More »

I remember back in the early 1980s when this movie played the local drive-in under the title of The Gates of Hell for something like three straight months. I always wondered why week after week whenever I opened up the local newspaper the same gaudy ad featuring a rotting skull stared at me screaming that it had been “Held Over! Fifth Gigantic Week!” when they could have been cycling in some different Italian gore movies. (They probably didn’t want to ditch the killer ad artwork.) Read More »

This time all our boys come home! No, really - this time we mean it! Three losers and a guy with a rich wife get the idea to head back to the Nam while sitting in a bar listening to a news report about a POW who escaped to freedom. I should correct myself. Make that four losers. The guy with the rich wife is sitting in the bar with his marine buddies on his daughter’s wedding day. Read More »

If you’re familiar with the original Cobra Mission, a movie titled Cobra Mission 2 might just trick you into thinking it had something to do with the original classic tale of a POW rescue mission gone horribly wrong. Unfortunately, Cobra Mission 2 spins the mostly unsatisfying yarn about Roger, the best there is at whatever it is he does. (Mainly throwing knives into people and sporting poofy hair that never wilts in the middle of a Latin American coup. In short, the usual.) Read More »

Just like I can never get enough of misfits taking on suicide missions to defeat the Nazis, just like I can never get enough of underdog athletes beating evil Russians/big city schools/rich country club puds, and just like I can never, EVER get enough of one cop playing by his own rules to single-handedly bring down terrorist plots against our super sweet freedom-loving country, I also can’t get enough of alien parasites, pods, eggs, slugs, and Martians getting their icky extraterrestrial butts shot, blown up, frozen, incinerated, stabbed, and just generally kicked by a handful of underpaid, underemployed actors that only look vaguely familiar! Read More »

The tree roots are alive! The tree roots are alive! Um, I mean they’re more alive than usual. Instead of just laying around doing nothing more than cracking the occasional sidewalk, the tree roots in the forest just outside of Littleton have turned it up to Defcon 4! After eating the lovable dog of the town’s resident old coot as well as a hitchhiker who was trying to escape a would-be rapist (that chick was having a bad day!), these underground uglies have developed a taste for small town goobers! Read More »

The single greatest movie character ever invented? The cop on the edge! He’s the guy who plays by his own rules, is often times on suspension, and frequently gets cussed out by his superior for “violating” some obscure “right” that’s been conferred on the criminal scum of this nation by a liberal activist judge. We know their names like our family’s names. Dirty Harry, John McClane, Mel Gibson, those two black guys in the Bad Boys movies, and Farley Wood. Read More »

Has Bruno Mattei ever made a bad movie? Or at least a bad movie that I haven’t loved? The auteur of awful responsible for such varied success stories as Rats: Night Of Terror (the best giant-rats-take-over-the-world movie ever!), Hell Of The Living Dead (crossdressers against zombies? That’s just common sense film making!), the literally excrement-filled Violence In A Women’s Prison, and the impenetrably fantastic mess that was aptly titled The Other Hell, checks in with his take on yet another junkfood genre - the killer shark movie! Read More »

Engineered to the be the perfect killing machine. Part man. Part robot. All ass kick! Cyber Warrior One will be the soldier of the future for the American military. Unaffected by extreme heat and cold, impervious to biological weapons and various and sundry toxins, and completely obedient in following all orders, no matter who wrong they may be, this ultimate force of devastation and freedom-spreading vengeance will continue to ensure our great country’s superiority for generations! But what if this cyborg was accidentally let loose on an unsuspecting world? What if it escaped before its orders could be downloaded into its electronic brain? What if the bunch of losers who were guarding it on a ship bumped into the closet holding Cyber Warrior One during a brawl over a poker game and let it out? Read More »

In any long-term relationship you’re going to encounter that moment where after years and years together you find yourself a bit bored by your partner. You know each other so well that there doesn’t seem to be anything left to discover and even that hairy mole on her chin isn’t endearing anymore so much as just flat out disgusting. When you hit this point and realize that you’ve been calculating how many of the CDs you would get post-breakup while she’s been asking when your back won’t be too screwed up to go back to work, you’ve got to decide whether you want to try and save things or not. Read More »

If your favorite parts of Italian war movies are the scenes of jeeps driving around some ugly foreign country, Days Of Hell will have you creaming in camos! Easily taking home the coveted title “Italian War Movie With Most Jeepage Per Minute,” Days Of Hell helmer Tonino Ricci (Rush, Rage, Raiders Of The Magic Ivory) brings an added depth to all the Jeeping around in the film, by having his crack commando team frequently jumping out of it to shoot native tribesmen and Russians. Additionally, in one Jeep-orgasmic sequence, D Team actually splits up and starts cruising around in two Jeeps! Two Jeeps? Admit it, you just got an M-16-sized chubby! Read More »

Death Smiled At Murder is an understated and uninteresting Italian horror film that unfortunately brought to mind comparisons to the similarly understated and uninteresting Italian horror film, The House With The Windows That Laughed. That film by Pupi Avati had this slow, pastoral quality to it with its lush countryside scenery and slack pacing. Death Smiled At Murder also has the benefit of some nice scenery and a fancy score that seeks to add some class to a movie that can’t help but betray its roots as an exploitation-revenge-from-beyond-the-grave drama. Since this was a Joe D’Amato movie after all, these low key scenes of characters having parties and going on hunting trips and taking bubble baths were punctuated by jarring shots of poorly realized gore straight out of Lucio Fulci movie. Read More »

If Don’t Torture A Duckling is for people that want Lucio Fulci before he went and got himself married to the special effects department (best man? Eye gouge! Maid of honor? Maggot storm! Flower girl? Pig guts!), then Deep Red is for Dario Argento fans that found his films to be either impenetrable trash like Inferno or nonsensically complicated murder mysteries like Tenebre or Opera. Read More »

This is another one of those giallo movies from Italy. My Italian is about as rusty as my recall of this movie, but roughly translated, giallo means “Italian slasher movie with noxiously bad heavy metal music substituting for suspense.” This time it’s directed by Lamberto Bava (Demons, A Blade In The Dark) and if this film is any indication, he managed to inherit only his last name from his famous father. Read More »

Does it make me a bad person if as soon as I saw the pregnant Mrs. Delta Force Commando, I was hoping she would be viciously murdered? I suppose I should explain. When you’re Delta Force Commando and have retired from the Delta Force for a military desk job, you’re always going to be yearning for some good old-fashioned black ops/plausible deniability mission that sees you slitting throats, blowing up choppers, and generally destabilizing unfriendly Third World governments. I know making sure the Puerto Rican base you’re stationed at maintains its inventory of staplers and paper clips is also an important part of American national security, but the rush you get from counting boxes of copy toner isn’t quite the same as diving out of exploding jeeps. Read More »

Would it make me a lazy oaf to call this movie Dullta Farce Commandope Boo? Maybe, maybe not, but it would most definitely make a liar out of me! Everything about Delta Force Commando II is twice what Delta Force Commando was! Twice as less action from Fred “The Hammer” Williamson! Twice the use of the same locations as War Bus Commando! Twice the confusing, bland, and poorly staged intrigue! And much more than two times as many scenes of Battlestar Galatica legend Richard Hatch over-emoting to the point of unintentional parody! Read More »

We continue our tour through the later portions of Lucio Fulci’s career (see also Aenigma, Sodoma’s Ghost and Zombi 3 for example) which is probably comparable to the tour you get from a colonoscopy, at least in the sense that you’re having something stuck up your butt. Lucio only made two more films after this one and I realize now how much we lost when he went and croaked on us in 1996. Can you imagine how bad the movies would be if he were still alive and making them today? Read More »

I’m not sure what’s scarier: the fact that Demons is often hailed as Lamberto Bava’s masterpiece or the fact that Lamberto Bava has a masterpiece at all. Lamberto is the son of Italian legend Mario Bava and if nothing else, he should be recognized for not letting a lack of talent get in the way of his drive to make movies. Once his dad died, Lamberto was free to begin cranking out awful movies in earnest. So it was that we were witnesses to Monster Shark, A Blade In The Dark, and Delirium, all films that serve only to make us appreciate the relatively painless experience that Demons is. Read More »

Those of you who were sitting through Demons 6 and wondering when it was that the whole Demons franchise went down the crapper only have to try and sit through the wretched Demons 2 to realize that it all started its horrifyingly fast downward spiral with its very first movie. You see, as you attempt to make heads or tails of what is transpiring in this mess, the one thing you’ll be able to figure out is that it’s pretty much the same movie as the first Demons movie, but much, much worse. In fact, you’ll start cataloging what’s wrong with Demons 2 and come to the conclusion that all those things were wrong with Demons as well. Read More »

The venerable Demons series of movies reaches the much sought-after milestone of numero six with this entry in a series of movies that are related only in that they are all really awful movies from Italian gore directors. I think it’s safe to assume that your reaction to a Demons 6 movie is the same as mine was when I hungrily plunked my $25 down to Midnight Video for this wholly “unofficial” DVD-R release: uh, so I guess this means that somewhere in the eighties there was a Demons 3, 4, and 5? Read More »

Let’s get the obligatory explanation of where this fits in to the Demons mythos out of the way: it doesn’t. It bears no relation to Demons, Demons 2 or Demons 4. I’ve never met anyone alive that has ever seen Demons 5 and as far as Demons 6 goes, I suppose this one bears a passing resemblance to it in that they are both hampered by inept female leads. Of course Demons 6 didn’t have the star of House By The Cemetery backing her up like this one does! As Tom, this guy excels at slapping his wife Cheryl around and belittling her writing career and mental problems! And he’s not even the ogre! Read More »

If you’re tired of Italian movies about zombies, cannibals, ancient Greeks, and cross-dressing slashers, Dial: Help provides some welcome relief in that it strives to achieve something just a little different . Striving to achieve something isn’t exactly the same as actually achieving something since the little twist put on things here is that instead of a fashion model being harassed by a guy in a wimpy beard or demented family member, she is being stalked by her telephone! Read More »

Django is widely regarded as the other movie that kickstarted the entire spaghetti western genre. Coming out about two years after Clint Eastwood’s and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful Of Dollars, Django somehow was the one that actually caught on in a huge way in the foreign market (though it remained virtually unseen in America for years) and caused not only every Italian guy with access to a camera to make a new-style western, but also caused them to put Django’s name in every one of their titles whether it was actually about a guy named Django or not. Read More »

The story goes (according to the two minute interview on this disc) that Franco Nero and his good buddy Nello Rossati were in Columbia shooting Alien Terminator together when they decided they should do a sequel to his classic spaghetti western Django. This must have come as a surprise to Sergio Corbucci, who made the original and wasn’t invited to join in their reindeer games, but who am I to begrudge Franco the chance to cash in on the name of Django when every single other person in the Italian film industry had already done so years ago? Read More »

Three of the cinema’s best genres are finally mixed together to produce a love child of death, dismemberment, and amputee fellatio! Taking the very finest elements of the Vietnam POW movie, the stolen Nazi gold movie, and the micro-budget mid 1980s Italian action movie, Dog Tags manages to even work in a strip club scene for no reason except that director Romano Scavolini (Nightmare In A Damaged Brain) is just that damn good! Could anything less be expected from the brother of the writer of American Rickshaw? Read More »

After watching this movie I came to a couple of conclusions. The first is that despite this being directed by their idol, Lucio Fulci, the gorehounds will be somewhat disappointed with it. The second thing I figured out is that in spite of Fulci’s reputation, anyone that enjoys a good, unsettling thriller will come away feeling very satisfied with what they’ve seen. The last and by far the most important thing I learned was that the title refers to a retarded girl’s Donald Duck doll. Read More »

Here’s a movie that’s going to satisfy that contingent of gladiator fans that like watching old, short guys near the end of their life strapping on the Roman soldier outfit and battling a bunch of guys half his age and still come out on top. Sure, in the end both of his brothers are killed in the battle, his sister commits suicide, and his father has been accusing him of being a coward and a traitor for most of the movie, but other than that, he came out on top.