Supposedly there was a little fad in the late fifties and early sixties following Kirk Douglas’ The Vikings where everybody in charge of those Hercules, Maciste or whatever name they were giving their hunky slab of beefy sword guy movies, decided to break out the long ships and fur trimmed coats to cash in on the Nordic craze that was sweeping some remote part of Minnesota. Read More

It is said that no parent should ever have to bury their child. Such a death, especially when the child is quite young, is certainly the most heartbreaking experience any of us could ever imagine. Of course, it’s much easier to swallow if our dead kid comes back as a vengeful ghost who kills all sorts of crappy villagers we blame for her death! That’s the most awesome experience any of us could ever imagine! Read More

Riccardo Freda was the director who started I vampiri, but it was cameraman and future legendary director Mario Bava who finished it after Freda got huffy and quit the movie after filming for ten days. Read More

Truly then, the gods have smiled upon us this day when they sent forth this second adventure of Hercules. Fresh from whatever it was that Herc accomplished in his first epic film, this movie opens with him saying his goodbyes to his buddies from the Argos and preparing to journey to his hometown of Thebes with his new wife Iole and his buddy Ulysses. Read More

Reg Park is one of our beefiest Hercules, with pecs the size of a regular guy’s head and his acting consists of standing around talking in a dubbed monotone, while periodically swinging giant paper-mâché stones over his head to accomplish whatever fantastic task this fun and colorful film demands of him. British horror legend Christopher Lee, who obviously lost some kind of bar bet, also shows up as the evil King Lico. Read More

A change of pace and perspective in the giallo genre, Hatchet for the Honeymoon forgoes the usual limp mystery about who the real killer is and instead chooses to have the killer tell us his story. It’s a smart move because it means the movie can concentrate on the most interesting character and be mercifully light with the screen time of types like the nosy Italian cop, the nosy relatives of the victims, and nosy reporters. Instead of one of these morons trying to solve the big case, you’ve got the killer on a journey of self discovery. Read More

Supposedly, The Giant of Marathon was a relatively big budget affair and I thought that with Hercules emeritus Steve Reeves (Goliath and the Barbarians) in the title role and director Jacques Tourneur (War-Gods Of The Deep) behind the camera that I might just be in for something a little more special than the usual all-male grab ass that these movies usually flexed and posed their way into by the end. On the “jock is half empty” side of things though, I was concerned that since it was about famed Olympian Phillipides, I was going to be subjected to some old time Olympic action. Read More

According to the liner notes on this DVD, in Italy back in the 1960s you were considered to be a homosexual unless you made a really bad Italian sex comedy. Well, Mario Bava (Baron Blood, Planet Of Vampires) was no flamer so he immediately decided to jump into this dubious genre and take a brief hiatus from his usual horror fare. The results are probably what you would expect them to be from a movie that was made solely to prove the manhood of an Italian horror director. 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

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